How can the internal IT department successfully react to cloud computing?

Becoming an external cloud provider requires massive capital investment in publicly accessible infrastructure and fundamentally changes the organization's business model, which is not a realistic IT department response.

By becoming an internal cloud provider, IT replicates public cloud capabilities - such as self-service provisioning, elasticity, and metered services - within the enterprise using a private cloud model, as defined by NIST SP 800-145, allowing IT to remain relevant and deliver business value while retaining governance and control.

Outsourcing all IT services eliminates the internal IT function entirely rather than repositioning it to meet cloud-era demands.

Focusing solely on security addresses only one domain of IT responsibility and ignores the broader service delivery transformation that cloud adoption requires.