The emergence of the cloud has ended IT’s traditional monopoly on service delivery. To get ahead of the intense pressures and elevated expectations of the cloud era, IT must shift its business and operational model from “sole provider and builder” to a hybrid delivery model. 

This paper shows that by accelerating the adoption and widening the footprint of management methods such as service lifecycle management, IT can turn cloud into an opportunity to transition smoothly into a new world of hybrid delivery. It also presents five actions senior IT management can take to expedite this transition with minimal risk and disruption.