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."

Comments

Duh

[RMH101]

Guess what? No-one wants to deal with a department. They have business objectives they want to be able to achieve, and they want to pay for someone to deliver those as painlessly as possible, at the lowest cost possible. This is why they probably founded an IT Department. If that department is too slow or sluggish to deliver, they'll go elsewhere..."The Cloud" just offers them the chance to get what they want at a predictable, fixed cost...

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

So they'll "write a check" for the "cloud" service, but we are expected to provide whatever they want for free. I don't have a magic room where I keep equipment (and people) that I can pull out at the drop of a hat. Resources cost money, but they do not want to pay fr them wen the resources are internal, but can always find money to hire outsiders.

Re:Duh

[MightyYar]

Congrats! You've pretty much illustrated exactly what this article is about!

Think of yourself in terms of having a customer and your competition is the cloud. Do you think the "cloud" provider is rude and surly? Do you think that they push back and make it seem like this whole idea is putting them out and making their life harder? I'm pretty sure they cheerfully offer services and then negotiate a price. Might even buy you dinner.

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

If a huge cloud host, like Salesforce, devotes more resources, expertise and time to their security, and has higher security standards than an internal IT department, what's the disadvantage of going with the cloud?

None. Hey wait, I see what you did there. Nice premise.

Sometimes the premise is that the cloud has worse security than the IT department.

And then the other 98% of the time, the relative security of the cloud vs internal is completely unknown and therefore can't be a factor in the decision. Management doesn't even understand how well their own IT department enforces security, and third parties are less well understood than that.

Re:Duh

[haystor]

All too often provisioning a new server costs weeks of paperwork and a ton of man hours from both IT and the business dept. Or, they can clone a new server in 30 minutes. There is no simliar service offered by IT, especially at big companies.

IT may have rules and procedures in place for good reasons, but all too often those rules are followed in a passive aggressive manner to put IT in control of business, instead of the other way around. Requests must be submitted with the hope of them being granted. Departments should be stating business cases and needs and IT should be helping figure out how they can help accomplish these. Frequently, this is not how it works.

Too many places, a request is made and IT denies it, telling the user they don't need what they're asking for. No research, no effort given, just a flat, automatic "no." I had a virus scanner fighting with my build, preventing the build from getting done. While our dept. is getting billed by IT for things, they refused to do anything at all about our new inability to build our main program. They had their rules that allowed them to say "no" and leave it at that. So here we are getting billed (internally) for IT support and being treated like no company in the world would treat a client. That is why departments move to the cloud.

The stories from developers fighting with IT are endless and all of them are countered by the same basic fear card and the general statement that users are idiots. In my two years at AT&T, I probably had firewall exceptions turned off a dozen times. They didn't keep their record keeping straight and couldn't justify a port being open between two computers so they shut it down. They didn't notify anyone at all, they just close a port. It would take 30 seconds to look up the paper trail on firewall exceptions and call/email the owner. There is a general arrogance that we are on "their" systems and not that they are managing "our" systems.

Re:Duh

[Penguinisto]

Agreed...

OTOH, who usually cleans up any messes that happens with it? Who gets blamed if the cloud provider has an outage?

Re:Duh

[Moryath]

IT may have rules and procedures in place for good reasons, but all too often those rules are followed in a passive aggressive manner to put IT in control of business, instead of the other way around.

You say that now. Then the Department Manager of your department, or the VP of Asshattery, gets caught doing various illegal things from his work desktop and IT gets word from on high to either (a) "cooperate fully" with a police investigation, (b) figure out how to hide it so it doesn't get to a police investigation, or (c) do some combination of (a) and (b) that may or may not be legal.

Departments should be stating business cases and needs and IT should be helping figure out how they can help accomplish these. Frequently, this is not how it works.

Everywhere I have worked, the process has gone line this:
- Department states business case. Part of the time, business case involves a complete lack of understanding of how the technology currently owned/operated by the company works. Part of the time, business case involves unrealistic assumptions like "it'll only take a couple days to move us from our current server environment to a completely different architecture." Part of the time, business case is actually reasonable.

- IT then figures out (a) what needs to be done to make it happen, (b) whether it can be done in a time-effective manner given the existing IT workload and available staff, (c) what it will cost to temp or outsource it if not. Sometimes there is also (d), whether the new toy the fuckwit VP du jour has purchased on company funds even does what he thinks it will do and how the FUCK to integrate it into the existing network.

The stories from developers fighting with IT are endless and all of them are countered by the same basic fear card and the general statement that users are idiots.

That's because for every story like yours, there are a dozen or more fuckwits like this or morons like this that the IT department has to contend with.

There is a general arrogance that we are on "their" systems and not that they are managing "our" systems.

And what you fail to consider is that "they" are caught between you, the user, and the weight of the company heads screaming the usual, contradictory priorities:

#1 Priority - "Just make everything work."
#1 Priority - "Keep everything safe."
#1 Priority - "Give the users what they want."
#1 Priority - "Protect the network from rogue users doing bad things."
#1 Priority - "Make the VP's latest toy cell phone plug in to everything."

Nothing that comes from "on high" for IT is ever not a "#1 Priority." IT is one of the most thankless tasks in existence. If everything is running well, people forget they exist. If something breaks or has to be taken offline for maintenance, someone is inevitably screaming bloody hell. Then they have to deal with mobile devices, 18 gazillion models of phone that everyone wants to hook in to company email, traveling flash drives that are a danger vector for worms coming in and corporate espionage going out...

Try putting yourself in their shoes once in a while. IT aren't the bad guys. They're stuck in a terrible position, under PHB's that make your department's PHB look like an utter genius by comparison, and your PHB is the guy who once took a week sick off of work after accidentally supergluing his hand to the family cat.

Re:Duh

[datapharmer]

Use that to your advantage. I have a client that has downsized their IT department out of existence. It is now completely outsourced to me and "the cloud". The reason? It would take literally *years* of arm twisting to get anything done internally.... there was always a reason it couldn't be done. Sometimes (but only sometimes) the reasons were legitimate. The difference between the IT staff that got fired and me, is when it could be done I did it and completed things on schedule. When it couldn't be done I told them why and provided other options. If they have an unrealistic expectation tell them that, but also tell them what their alternatives are: spend more money now, use "cloud" (aka rented) resources ad pay later. Show them the cost projections for the service versus the acquisition for 1 year versus 3 or 5 years. The company I mentioned earlier now uses a combination of hosted/cloud services and (locally) outsourced IT to manage their internal infrastructure. Their costs are a fraction of what they were 3 years ago, and I guarantee if you ask anyone there they will tell you that they are happier with the quality, reliability and types of services they have now versus 3 years ago. Sure some companies are run by morons who will save a buck now and find themselves in a nice steaming pile of IT infrastructure meltdown later, but a decent number of companies are just tired of lazy, socially inept IT employees holding back the entire company.

Re:Duh

[Carewolf]

IT may have rules and procedures in place for stupid reasons, and all too often those rules are followed in a passive aggressive manner, because management does not trust their own employees as much as they trust outsiders, and has forced stupid rules on IT and denied them a budget of their own.

There fixed that for you. As a developer, I probably fight more against IT every day than most other employees, but IT departments are a product of the company environment. They ignore new issues because taking on more responsibility is not something they are paid extra for, and more often than not, they are punished for being helpful when their other projects slip. Punish people for being helpful often enough, and they will stop helping.

Re:Duh

[Old97]

The other groups in the business are not my customers. They are my partners. If I were a consultant, ASP, cloud provider, or other vendor, my interests would be in making money for my company, not doing what is best for my customer. Sometimes the interests of the customer and the vendor coincide, but often they do not. A lot of vendors rake in tons of money doing whatever is asked of them with little or no regard for how bad it is or will be for their customer. That may please some clueless manager who is trying to look good, but it's not good for our employer. As a partner I have to care about our common employer. I have to be willing to push back when they want to do something stupid - something that is against the best interests of our company. That's in part what I'm paid to do. That's why we have an IT department.

That being said, I'm not advocating being a surly, snotty pain in the ass - a Mordac. We have to work to understand the requirements and challenges of our partners and help all of us through them. It's like a marriage. It takes work.

Re:Duh

[Carewolf]

An "internal cloud" is a server in your data center. It's not a cloud. It's a re-appropriation of jargon in an attempt to steer ignorant management types back to the old way of doing things.

An "external cloud" even by a big brand-name provider is not a cloud either. It's a re-appropriation of jargon in an attempt to steer ignorant management types into buying old hosting services with a new fancy name.

Re:Duh

[unimacs]

"blah blah blah fuckwit VP du jour blah blah blah "

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.

Of course

[crashumbc]

Because their IT departments actually use the word "NO" when the managers want to do something stupid and retarded...

Re:Of course

[derrickh]

This is the exact attitude why managers like to avoid dealing with IT.

IT exists to help the rest of the company. Instead of saying 'NO', you need to figure out a way to say 'Yes' while solving the problems that make the request 'stupid and retarded'
D

Re:Of course

[dkleinsc]

I take it you've never worked in an organization that worked something like this:

Manager: "I need a perfect solution to the Traveling Salesman Problem - I just signed a 7-figure contract saying we'd provide that in 2 weeks."
IT: "There's no way to do this, we've got lots of papers and well-known theory that proves that this is a problem the best mathematical and scientific minds that have ever existed in the last 50 years aren't able to solve."
Manager: "Just get it done, ok? Look, there's a lot of money riding on this."

2 weeks later ...
Manager: "So where's that Traveling Salesman Problem solution I asked for?"
IT: "It's not ready yet. As I previously mentioned, it's a virtual impossibility."
Manager: "Keep at it - we can run over, it will penalize us in the contract a bit. Work overtime, stay in the office, do whatever else you need to do, until it's done."

4 weeks later ...
Manager: "So why isn't this Traveling Salesman Problem ready?"
IT: "As I previously mentioned, there's no way to do this."
Manager: "Your fired."

Re:Of course

[baptiste]

Exactly - because if the IT department explains the risks, but goes ahead anyway because 'they said so' and then it blows up - who gets blamed? The brain dead manager that wouldn't listen or the IT department because it was an 'IT project'. Even if you have extensive documentation backing up the warnings you gave, it's too technical' and at the high mgmt level all they hear is 'IT screwed up' and it was an IT project. One of the main reasons I got out of corporate IT management - chronic lack of funding and not being listened to when you gave realistic cost and time projections for what was asked for and you never could achieve 'success' only 'not failing'. Nobody cheers for the power company because they keep the lights on day in and day out, but when the power goes out, they're public enemy #1.

Re:Of course

[surgen]

IT geeks do not run the company. They are there to provide service to the company, and to do as they are told.

Hey IT, go break HIPAA for me. I don't care that you're going to be held personally legally responsible. Its your job to do what I say!

Re:Of course

[tnk1]

The answer is not to say "No", it is to say "Yes, but I will need X amount of money to get it done", where X is what it takes to do what it takes, no matter what. Once you put money into the equation, the management types will either give you the cash (doubtful) or they will back off. Sometimes, they push back and say "you don't need that!". You just tell them that its a rush project and it wasn't budgeted, so there really is no money for it. You really, really, really want to do what they want, but alas, you just need to get the equipment/people to get it done.

Keep saying "Yes" and explaining what you need to get the problem done in terms of dollars (or whatever you use). Management doesn't understand the word "impossible", but they do understand "incredibly expensive". Give them a path they can follow to get the money. Given the usual organization's reluctance to part with money, the rush project deadline will pass before the money is approved to be spent. That then shifts the blame to someone else, sometimes even the fool who made the stupid request to begin with.

You have only said "Yes we can!" to the questions. You may have to do some research and presentations to justify your numbers, but that's nothing compared to trying to implement the impossible. If you get really good at it, your face doesn't even momentarily change to horror when you get that sort of request, you just simile and hand them the price tag.

One thing you need to learn in business. Never say "No". You will look like you are an obstruction, rather than part of the "solution". I've found the way management works is based partially on what I call "happy horseshit", which means that your attitude tends to mean more than facts do. Even if you are correct 100% of the time, if you present that with a negative attitude, you're just as apt to be shunned or even fired as the incompetent people. Indeed, you'll probably be hated more, because the incompetent people might well be amiable idiots.

Re:Of course

[surgen]

What? You can't be serious. It will not bite them in the ass, it will bite you in the ass because you knowingly did something illegal. If my boss asks me to murder someone, I can't dodge the legal responsibility if I get it in writing that I am doing it under protest.

The purpose of the laws that hold the IT people responsible is so that they can't be coerced into doing it anyway, they're protected under the "employer can't fire you for not doing something illegal" protections.

Welcome Brothers!

[Anrego]

This has been happening to us in the software world for some time. It's purely a cost thing (imo), which "dealing with IT" is a factor of, but in general I think it is a lot simpler.

Need some software. Your options be:

- Pay a team of developers to design, build, and maintain the software you use. Advantage is you get exactly (or well, in theory anyway) what you want. Disadvantage is it can take time to get the bugs sorted out

- Buy something off the shelf which is close enough. Advantage is you get it right away, it is generally mature out of the box, and you don’t need to keep a bunch of guys around to sort out bugs. Additionally because they sell this software to hundreds of users, they can throw way more development resources as it than you ever could (ye old horizontal market). Disadvantage is you don’t get exactly the features you want, but even that is changing as stuff becomes more extendable and more companies offer “customization”.

Option 2 starts looking very good, with option 1 becoming more reserved for “weird” or original software that no one else has written. A depressing trend.

I suspect as this same thing happens with infrastructure, you will find the same. Most businesses use some external provider, and the “real IT” jobs are mainly at places providing infrastructure to others, or handling really unusual cases.

Re:Welcome Brothers!

[Cytotoxic]

There is another advantage to "off the shelf" software. Customization is difficult and expensive, so the incentive is to mold your business practice to fit the software. This can actually be a good thing. In many situations it can prevent time wasted reinventing the wheel.

If I was starting a mortgage business tomorrow, I'd buy an off-the-shelf mortgage origination package and design my entire business practice around the way the software works. This is because the mortgage industry is very mature, and the packages that exist address most business needs right out of the box.

I happen to work in an industry that has fewer than a dozen companies, worldwide. And really there are only a couple of major players. There is no off-the-shelf solution for our business model, so I've seen the 'build in house' model up close. It is fantastic for providing exactly what the business needs. Everything can be custom tailored to the exact demands of the business at that moment.

This is also a major weakness of this approach. When there are no limits to what you can do, well... there's no limits to what they can ask for. Smart people tend to be creative. So we end up getting a deluge of feature requests, a large majority of which won't actually help the business. If you can't say "no" on technical grounds you are left arguing on business needs - not the IT mission in the minds of most managers. So you end up building a lot of things that won't really help. In most real-world situations, off-the-shelf carries major advantages in terms of focusing the business on things that will grow the business.

God, I can sympathize

[elrous0]

Seriously, I would rather pull my own teeth than deal with my last company's IT people. Getting anything done through them was a nightmare. "Customer service" wasn't even a concept on their radar. "No" was the only word in their vocabulary. They had perfected a variation on "security through obscurity," which could best be characterized as "security through inaction." By not allowing anyone or anything on the system, they kept it secure. Here was a typical exchange:

Me: We've got a new program that's going to make the company a lot of money
Them: We can't do anything to help you. And if you try and go around us, we'll try to stop you.
Me: I just want to put up a simple html webpage with information on it.
Them: Can't do it. It's a security risk.

Answer Cloudy

[ShakaUVM]

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.

I was "all in" for a bit

[weave]

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.

Hello... IT...

[N0Man74]

Have you tried turning off the Cloud, and turning it back on again?

Re:The problem with IT.. well.. one anyway

[Cytotoxic]

I've worked at 3 different companies in my career, and at each of them, IT as an organization held the attitude that the company existed for their benefit, and not the other way around.

IT needs to understand that it is a service organization with the mission of satisfying its customer by providing top notch service and support, and asking "how high?"

I've heard this exact phrase many times over the years, particularly from big-company alumni. This attitude is exactly why companies fail. The only way to be successful is for all members of the team to work together to make the company successful. If your organization fails to foster true collaboration at all levels, your organization blows.

It is human nature that everybody wants to be in control. Sales managers want to have everyone cater to their whims, marketing wants their ideas followed without question, even the guys over in finance want to have their ideas implemented across the board without discussion. Well, following that paradigm will get you nothing but failure.

In a properly functioning company there should be no division between IT and the business unit (and accounting and legal and etc.). Any challenge being faced by the business should be addressed by all members of the organization. If the sales team is having trouble increasing business and feels that a new web application would help, a multidisciplinary team from all aspects of the business should brainstorm the problem and come up with the best solution possible for the company as a whole. There may be accounting reasons for using cloud services that are brought to the table by the Finance guys, and a better technical solution might come from the IT staff.

Your "service organizations ask 'How High?'" idea leads to misguided projects that don't address the underlying problem and fail to grow the business. Any manager worth their salary should know that they are not the expert in everything and welcome input from all quarters.

Of course, at the end of the day someone has to make a final call. But the 'service organization' meme is a stupid relic of the 90's outsourcing craze and has no business in modern corporate life.