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Why Businesses Move To the Cloud: They Hate IT
jfruhlinger writes "Cloud services can be unreliable and pricey, and they often duplicate capabilities larger companies already have in-house. So why do many managers within organizations use them? Partly because they don't want to deal with their own company's IT department. Getting a big project started is often such a politically fraught process that for many managers it's easier to simply write a check."
Different reasons for different sized businesses.
I moved my small corporation to "the cloud" because even though there have been outages (thoug not for us) in the cloud, it's still far more reliable than running a linux box in a neighborhood where PG&E apparently trips over their own power cords every month, and a UPS only buys the incompetents a short window to get it back up.
And it's cheaper and more reliable than colocing.
Has nothing to do with "hating IT" in our case. Hell, I am the IT guy in addition to all my other hats. Small businesses are like that.
This reads like an article from circa 1980, just replace "Cloud" with "Personal Computer".
People didn't want to wait for access to the mainframe, they went to Radio Shack and bought a TRS-80, or whatever local store you had and picked up an Apple, CBM, random CP/M machine, etc.
Then more PCs showed up, they needed to share data, IT installed a network ...
Isn't this where . . .
I was "all in" for a bit, was supporting the idea of moving an entire college's email system into one of these systems. We set up a pilot and due to a certain username transition going on with that company, it wiped out about 100 of our user's PERSONAL non-college data from the site because they had associated their college email address with the service in the past.
We begged and pleaded for help. They said they were looking into it. No updates. No promise to make it right. About 2-3 weeks after that, the user's data started to be restored. But I've never felt so helpless during that period. There was nothing I could do. It's a free service, so there wasn't much recourse either.
I have, or my staff have, in the past done some really stupid things that interrupted service or temporarily lost user data. But we were right on top of it, worked around the clock to fix it, and learned from the mistakes. It's a horrible feeling to lose a system but it's nothing compared to the hopeless feeling of losing user data in a system you have absolutely no control over.
Needless to say, the pilot opened our eyes.
I run a small IT department. A lot of people don't understand the ins and outs of our jobs, any more than we understand all the accounting rules or HR policies. For some reason though IT people can be unbelievably condescending when it comes to our area of expertise.
I overheard one of our support staff telling a Mac developer that he couldn't have admin rights to his Mac because we needed to "protect him from himself". This from a guy who has a tiny fraction of experience maintaining Macs compared to the developer he was talking to.
Let's just say I had a few words with that member of our support staff about how not to talk to our users. Further I instructed everyone that the phrase "protect you from yourself" should never come out of the mouth of anyone on our staff again. "Protect our network from increasingly sophisticated attacks", - fine. "Protect you from yourself." - not OK. Just to be clear, I'm not some dude with management experience and limited technical knowledge brought in to run the department. I have a CS degree and worn both software development and network support hats for many years.
Now I'm sure you've never called the VP in question a "fuckwit" to their face, but I will not tolerate that attitude. I had a contractor (this time it was a developer) regularly insulting one of our support staff's ability using vulgar terms behind his back. He was the sort of guy that some organizations will put up with as long a they're performing. I dumped him as soon as I could find a replacement. People like that, even if they are extremely talented, have a way of dragging the whole team down.