Slashdot Mirror
Adopt the Cloud, Kill Your IT Career
snydeq writes "IT professionals jumping into the cloud with both feet beware: It's irresponsible to think that just because you push a problem outside your office, it ceases to be your problem. It's not just the possibility of empty promises and integration issues that dog the cloud decision; it's also the upgrade to the new devil, the one you don't know. You might be eager to relinquish responsibility of a cranky infrastructure component and push the headaches to a cloud vendor, but in reality you aren't doing that at all. Instead, you're adding another avenue for the blame to follow. The end result of a catastrophic failure or data loss event is exactly the same whether you own the service or contract it out.'"
or vagina
no one even knows what the cloud is. It's everything, it's nothing, it's cheaper, it's not.
run your IT shop like everything else, with common sense. Can external hosting work sometimes? sure, if so, do it and stop worrying about it.
Since you "know computers" it will still be your problem.
If I had a dime for every time I got blamed or was asked to fix something that was clearly outside of my sphere of influence...
well, I probably wouldn't be reading slashdot right now.
I think that if we adopt the cloud model for our internal networks (i.e. a private cloud) that would help improve manageability of the network.
Rather then outsource to someone else's cloud, create your own.
I sort of agree with the blurb that started this thread.
Instead of being a skilled professional with power to change things and work on a problem, when you go to the cloud you demote yourself to a gopher who can only make complaints via a phone call when things don't work.
Aside from making yourself much more dispensable ( "Well, gee, *I* can call and complain too") you get the frustration of feeling powerless. At least with your own systems you can go in, take readings and try things.
I guess "cloud" at this point means, "Running your programs on a computer with a network connection."
Palm trees and 8
This has nothing specifically to do with "the cloud" at all. It's the same problem you have when you outsource anything -- the company you hired might not provide the quality you were expecting.
Can we please stop the re-hash of old ideas with buzzwords attached? This is a site for engineers, not MBA idiots.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Agreed. What's worse is that your skillset gradually atrophies away until you're barely able to do anything of value, other than manage "Sales Force" passwords, or write throwaway scripts to use against someone's proprietary API.
The hard stuff? Well, that's why we have consultants!
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
...that just because it's "in the cloud", there are now bigger issues to worry about. That single Internet connection? Time to add redundancy. Backups? I wouldn't trust their SLA any farther than the door. Security? Hah!
Campus decided to outsource our e-mail to Microsoft BOPS, rather than just do Exchange (or something else) on campus. Problem was that doesn't mean that suddenly campus IT just gets to say "e-mail isn't our problem, call MS!" No, rather IT still hast o do front line support but now when there's a problem you have to call someone else, get the runaround, finger pointing, slow response, and so on.
Net result? We now have an Exchange server on campus and do e-mail that way.
It isn't like outsourcing something magically makes all problems go away, particularly user problems. So you still end up needing support for that, but then you get to deal with another layer of support, one that doesn't really give a shit if your stuff works or not.
Basically people need to STFU about the "cloud" and realize that it is what it always has been: outsourcing and evaluate if it makes sense on those merits. Basically outsourcing is a reasonable idea if you are too small to do something yourself, or if someone does a much better job because they are specialized at it. If neither of those are true, probably best not to outsource.
"The end result of a catastrophic failure or data loss event is exactly the same whether you own the service or contract it out"
I disagree. Instead of your head rolling, its likely to be your cloud providers head. Much better- in my opinion. For somebody who does something useful besides maintaining an aging fleet of XP machines, I think the cloud really helps people and companies get past the IT technicalities and get back to doing work that is productive and makes money.
It depends on what you use the cloud for.
To exchange files inside an organization (Google Docs/Drive, Dropbox, whatever) ? You save the hassles of maintaining a file server, daily backups, etc. Also gives more features as in the ability of sharing some docs with third parties for example.
For mail ? Why not, there are plenty of services, all of which work probably better than a self maintained server.
For your mission critical custom application ? No way.
Moving IT infrastructure to the cloud doesn't mean you stop monitoring it and acting upon various problems. You just change the actors involved into getting a solution together.
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-01-07/
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
It doesn't matter if the processes that create the output are in your office, your server room or even your building. You're providing the services that produce the output the business needs and the business management wants. If I.T. has made the transition in your workplace to service provider you will always have a place as the person making sure the desired output is delivered. If management still sees I.T. as the people who take care of the computers then yes you'd have something to worry about.
I imagine that the MBAs realize it simply outsources the problems. From their perspective this is better. If the IT guys screw up then all they can do is fire them. If the Cloud has a problem, then they have a breach of contract with [Amazon/Microsoft/etc].
Whether or not they could recover any significant damages doesn't matter. Or the probability of failure. They have someone outside the organization to hold accountable. Someone who can be sued.
I have never ever met a co-worker with an IT title or job description who pushed for "Cloud" "Workflow" "CRM" "Near Sourcing" "Off Shoring" or whatever other new name for old tech that might fly across executive management's desk. That is for CEOs and people who don't know what the fuck they are talking about to chase, and for us to implement.
Are we talking about IT professionals or managers? Since outsourcing became a dirty word with a proven track record of job losses in exchange for questionable gains it was re-badged as the "cloud".
IT professionals by and large recognize in function that the cloud is just today's shiny version of a main frame and dumb terminals. IT Managers see the "Cloud" as a way to outsource services and reduce costs. We saw the same thing when everyone thought you could outsource all the IT jobs to India.
I'm at a place now where we have a brand new CIO. Our brand new CIO has heard about the BYOD trend. BYOD means that users buy their own computer and take purchase their own software. We will will even give the user an advance to pay for this. In and of itself this is not bad, but somehow the new CIO somehow thinks that this extends to our users also managing their own devices. In effect he thinks BYOD means that we can outsource computer management (back end stuff like patching, asset, inventory, licensing etc) to our user-base.
Outsourcing is outsourcing, whether it's to India, a contract house, the cloud or your own user base. Any time you hand over control to outsiders you are going to necessarily have problems, how does changing the label change the principals?
Moving to the cloud is easier, which is why we keep considering it. It is easier to off load the work onto some cloud operator who is supposed to do it better and possibly cheaper, or at least it LOOKS easier. No more dealing with backup tapes, No more dealing with software licenses and the like, just pay your vendor of choice copy all your data onto the cloud and start tossing hardware and the people that managed it out the door.
Problem here is that doing this job right, on a budget, and on time is FAR from easy. Plus, it is going to be very difficult to verify that your vendor is actually doing the job correctly, considering that the hardware isn't accessible, being located in some server room some distance away. Who knows if they actually do backups of anything, much less actually do off site storage of recovery media. My guess is that as competition in this area heats up, prices will fall with quality falling too. Costs will be trimmed by eliminating skilled labor and without skilled labor the whole house of cards will fall.
Seems to me that the cloud may be a short term gain for most, but in the long run, dumping your infrastructure and the people that go with it is going to bite you eventually, unless the business is very small.
Finally, the biggest messes I've had to clean up had very little to do with a hardware failure or some loss of data. The worst messes I've seen where caused by some administrative error.... Replacing the wrong disk in the RAID, causing the total data loss or not thinking though a command before hitting enter. I don't see how being on a cloud will fix this kind of thing.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I deal with large MFP copiers that can scan to email and I love "THE CLOUD". Since the two manufacturers I deal with cannot figure out TLS it's a huge issue. Then the IT guys yell at me cause he moved everything without ever asking if our equipment would have an issue.
Good thing Stunnel exists or we would be having major issues.
If you outsource most of your IT workload to the cloud, you'll be stuck with it, and it becomes very difficult to upgrade services/applications. I know some companies that outsource their email and regret it. They can't use addon features that some applications/databases require, service is painfully slow, archiving is a pain and expensive. It's just not worth it.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
When the Cloud is a bunch a servers that sit in the US which are subject to laws that enable the US to snoop through your private data at will the answer has been, and will continue to be "no".
Not to mention that more of those laws seem to be on the way. I would say that any business/government should find that it is unacceptable and unethical to potentially subject your clients to that (unless already subject to US law by residing there already in which case it doesn't really matter).
They didn't involve my office in the process at all. They knew they wanted to dump their big ERP for something else, but they chose a cloud based SaaS solution and we warned them that it was probably not a good idea considering their size. Now we get tech support calls almost every day complaining that the SaaS website is frozen, and all we can do is shrug and call the SaaS company's support line because we have no control over it. My boss didn't want to tell them "I told you so" but...
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
It's all about out sourcing and exporting national (would-be) treasure to cheap slave labor based markets
One day it'll bite ALL
the "cloud" is the latest (in a long line) of over used buzz words
are you running a few virtual machines on a couple of midlevel servers? probably not "cloud computing"
are you considering virtualizing a large number of servers to achieve high performance/high availability/infrastructure as a service/or some other "as a service" buzzword? probably "cloud computing"
where your "cloud configuration" exists is another issue. there was an article (Forbes maybe) that pointed out how much less money is required to start/run an "Internet startups." With the "public cloud provider" being Amazon Web Services (i.e. just because you are using the "cloud" doesn't mean you outsourced everything)
remember that "I.T." is about helping a company do whatever it is they do - the need for "I.T. people" (especially in security, virtualization, and developers) is not going away, but if you are a "hardware only" tech, spending your day replacing power supplies and installing new hard drives, you don't have a future in corporate IT departments ...
It ain't what they call you. It's what you answer to. http://mylyceum.us/
It depends on what your role is. I work as a systems engineer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_engineering), but notably not in IT. My job involves a great deal of 'outsourcing' work to others, whether it is internal (specifying hardware or software requirements for other departments to build to) or external (coordinating suppliers and development partners). I'm responsible for making sure the integrated whole works; if I had to simultaneously know as much as the specialist engineers do on every single subject, from software algorithms to epoxy composition to thermal analysis (which would be impossible anyway) I wouldn't have time to do my job. Delegating that work to other specialists doesn't diminish my value; it empowers me to do other things. Sure, maybe some of my own original specialist skillset is diminished, but it is replaced with another skillset. So, I'm not sure the 'skills' argument is that important, unless as an individual IT worker you're concerned about staying in your field, which is your problem, not the companies.
Relinquishing control is a bigger issue. Sometimes that will work fine, sometimes it won't. One needs to analyze their situation, and do the risk assessments.
Lest your sanity leave you.
Fun when things break and you and the folks responsible for the "other" side of things get into a blame-pointing game in a conference call.
" You have a bad transmitter ! "
" No YOU have a bad receiver ! "
" I'm not seeing any data from you ! "
" We're seeing data leaving fine, must be a problem on your end ! "
Bad enough when this happens within the same company, a nightmare when two get involved. :|
The end result of a catastrophic failure or data loss event is exactly the same whether you own the service or contract it out.
This is MBA perspective, not in the trenches. In MBA-land a one day outage is a one day outage, doesn't much matter. In the trenches a one day cloud outage means you lay at the beach and occasionally dial into a conference call, whereas a one day non-cloud outage means you spend 24 hours in the office slinging hardware and backup tapes.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
A much nicer euphemism than "I have no fucking clue how that part gets done" is "this part of the system doesn't care how that part of the system works."
Private Cloud could mean something as simple as "I got my abstractions right."
All that stakeholders care about is results. If you have an infrastructure problem internally and push things to the cloud to solve it (as the summary discusses) and your cloud vendor is not 100%, your stakeholders are still going to come after you (meaning I.T.). After all, they really shouldn't have to worry about where data is stored or how it is accessed. That is your job (I.T.) not theirs. On the other hand, any problems with service affects their jobs and your department (I.T.) is at fault regardless if it is an internal problem or with a vendor you contracted with.
People complain about the bean counters all the time. They're a piece of cake, you just need to talk their language and show a decent ROI. Upset the sales or manufacturing side of things, though and you will be out on the street.
It's not that adopting the cloud kills your career. It's putting your career in the hands of outside vendors that has the potential to kill it.
All a recipe for disaster IMO.
Then again, I'm one of those infosec control-freak types who will corner a salesperson and brutally interrogate them over the crap their iPad has brought into my networks, or even better, the confidential documents they store in public, online data warehouses...
"You put WHAT on Google Docs??!!"
YMMV.
Keep it in house. That way, when something inevitably gets fucked, you can actually do something about it.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/100000/60000/0000/400/160498/160498.strip.print.gif
Couldn't find the "mashup" on dilberts site, but still good.
Plus, your cloud vendor is in the IT business like everybody else. Like any IT business (or any business for that matter), they have a bottom line to watch and will choose to provide the minimal acceptable service to maximize profits, or they will charge a lot extra to exceed those standards. But, unlike your business, when they need to make business decisions that lead to cost reductions, you don't necessarily know about it until it is too late.
The post is so full of mixed metaphor that it is nearly meaningless. The author should take a writing class, it might also improve their technical writing skills as well. I can only assume the worse from someone that who uses metaphor as a crutch (see what I did there).
I have to agree. This summary is, well, crap. Anyone trying to "push problems" to somewhere/someone else rather than resolving the problem shouldn't be working in IT for a start.
This is another "fear the cloud, it eats babies" post, which are becoming more frequent recently. I know I'd never make a decision of how/where to host apps/services purely on one criteria, eg: getting rid of my local headache.
Yet another failure of an IDG article.
http://www.infoworld.com/print/195144
Discussion System prefs link: http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=editcomm
The trick is to get a job at a Cloud provider. No gopher status for me.
Most of the cloud (IaaS, SaaS, whatever) services out there boils down to this: you are outsourcing some or all of your infrastructure (losing control) and are still saddled with all of the responsibility to make it work.
It is yet another way to hack away at the internal IT cost center. Can "cloud" be a good idea? Sure, if you are delivering metered services (Netflix, SaaS), or are entirely office-less.
We outsourced our fax, CRM, and backup and it is "fine." Management thinks it's fantastic because it is so cheap... but I am sitting here right now waiting for a our fax system to come back online due to a cable outage in California (I'm in the midwest). That's the reality of this type of shift. I am completely responsible for this outage and I can do absolutely nothing to fix it or to prevent further outages (other than redundant services which management shot down due to cost).
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Fast, cheap, or easy. Pick one.
We're looking very seriously at the cloud for all new deployments and likely catching a few existing systems.
Not generic things like email or whatever, but for our own company applications. Cost is a major consideration sure, but honestly the biggest win I'm looking for is being able to specify a deployment in code (XML, whatever) and actually see it executed correctly and timely. The ability to deploy an entire infrastructure with the same ease we currently have of typing "make all" to compile.
Server allocations, network ACL settings, storage needs, all of it. All the stuff that currently takes 3-5 teams (DB operations, Sysadmins, Network Operations, etc, etc) a few weeks or months to do, screw up, screw up again, redo thrice, etc. None of this is particularly fancy or new, it's the same basic requests every time. Yet IT can never, ever deploy anything quickly, accurately, or efficiently.
And it's not just this company's IT. It's most every company's IT department. I know, I know, there's a bazillion reasons why this or that can't happen in whatever way, etc. I don't give a flying fuck about the excuses, by bosses sure as hell don't, at the end of the day NOT ONE is ever valid.
The cloud promises to replace all that repetitive deployment headache with the ability to simply specify what we need in a tidy little XML file and press Go. We're talking about taking a part of our SDLC that previously took weeks or months and doing it in seconds. Accurately. Reliably. Repetitively. Without complaints. Without obstacles. Without lost email. Without fat fingers.
That is why your IT department should be incredibly scared of the cloud. Because you've been doing a shit job for decades and now someone has finally figured out how to literally replace yall with 5 lines of script code.
This isn't a question of outsourcing ("internal" clouds are just fine), this is a question of obsolescence. Most of the human hands in a typical IT department are going to have all the modern relevance of a horse and buggy repairman.
My
I used to run regional ISP's for a living (~150k users in multiple states). As an ISP, we had "cloud" infrastructure before it was cool. Among other things we had high speed internet connections, PRI connections, and vendor outsourced dial-up pools. As the head of technology for these companies, I was unable to see anything past my router interface (except incoming traffic, of course). When the T-1 to a customer crashed, there was absolutely nothing I could do except make good and damn well sure it wasn't a hardware issue. If my dial-up lines were down, all I could do was, well, make good and damn well sure it wasn't my hardware at fault.
This problem is nothing new. What's new is scale, and in a way that is unprecedented. Back in the day we had T-3's and multiple PRI's, and, at the end, an OC-3, but that was about the extent of it. However, when managing "the cloud", you're talking about the network backbone, along with servers, storage, and who all knows what else. In other words, at the hardware level, you're damn near blind.
What could possibly go wrong? Oh, wait...
Even back then it was complex. My survival tactic was to learn how to make the guys at the other end of the telephone lines believe I worked for them when I called. That, and be really nice to the ones who could actually solve a problem and get their cell phone numbers (and Norm, if you're out there, thank you for your home phone number!).
As someone stated earlier, the "cloud" is that part of the Visio network diagram where you have no idea what the #@$& is going on or what the @#$* it is running on, and you have zero level of visibility to it. Hence, the term "cloud".
I spent many sleepless nights talking to Cisco's help desk in Australia and waiting in a queue at the RBOC's office to solve a problem I knew without a shadow of a doubt was not mine. (Except the one time it was, but that guy was pistol-whipped, sock-partied, and sacked. And then re-sacked to make sure.) I can't imagine how anyone over a decade later figures outsourcing *MORE* could be a fantastic career move, especially when the technology behind it isn't really all that old. At least OC-3's, PRI's, and T-3's had at least a decade of real-world use when I was doing it. Doing it on unknown code with vendors who can't possibly have more than a few years of experience? I don't think so.
Bill
When you make the conscious decision to use a word which means something different to every ear and carries a hopelessly ambiguous and nebulous definition then your a goddamn smurf.
If you like being blue, two apples tall, living in a mushroom house and having to wait in a (long long) line for smurfette...then by all means to the "cloud".
So, you want to keep your job. You read a nice, informative article on some businessy web site. OK, I'm never going to touch that cloud shit. I could get fired. Now, how do you manage your company's needs without using the cloud? I hope you know, hire people that know, etc. Because guess what happens if you lose all the data in that case?
Just tell your wife/mother, "Well, at least I didn't get fired for using the cloud!"
In auto manufacturing Production (guys putting cars together) blame Materials (guys who get parts to Production) and Material blames the Suppliers...
I put my entire business on Megaupload.com and now I've lost everything!! Boo hoo, why didn't slash dot warn me sooner?
Yes, lets argue that a technology distribution method is worse, by explaining the extreme cases.
Not all IT solutions are good for the cloud. Some are. Email for example is good for the cloud. IT staff running an email server is usually a time sap, you have security concerns, if it goes down, it needs to be treated as more of a critical problem then it really is, you need to keep updates to prevent spam. You need to pay for storage... Hosing email in the cloud, can save your organization money, and reduce the stress of your IT staff, allowing them to work on more things.
However more advanced systems, that requires a lot of customizations, are not fit for the cloud, if you go with a could solution you have locked yourself out of software really designed for your business.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If you contact with a substantial company, and insure there are service agreements in the contract, with penalties for not meeting them, you will be no worse off than housing the data center on site.
Go with some fly by night or 1/2 free service, well, might as well have your boxes ready, just in case.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Why don't we use hosted servers?
Think about it like this, a [industry] business is based on information, confidentiality and good reputation.
How would you like it if you were involved in a [transaction] with, say, a [business] who mishandled funds related to [your stuff]. Your [representative] puts all his files on a hosted EC3 or Azure server and there's a breach. Those documents could well include confidential communications, financial information, etc., etc., etc., Now your confidential information is out in the wild.
What would that say about the trustworthiness of your [representative] and his/her processes?
We employ multi-layered security to ensure that doesn't happen. We control who has physical access to our VM infrastructure as well as network access. Those who have administrative access are all employees of [business]. They're not employees of a third party who has no stake (other than retaining the revenue stream) in the success of the [business].
And I haven't even touched on the network bandwidth issues -- we have to manage and process huge amounts of data, much of which comes from our customers.. If I send you a couple dozen DVDs, will [your hosting provider] load them up onto the server? No? Then we have to transfer huge datasets of customer data across the internet So then we need to increase the size of our network pipes. What's the latency between [provider's] data centers and Europe? Asia?
We get anywhere from sub-millisecond to 10-15ms latency between our offices and our virtual infrastructure. Unless we move our offices into the [provider's] data centers, we won't get anything close to that.
I could go on and on and on.
Bottom line, hosted servers are great. 95% of our servers are VMs. We just host them on our own virtualization infrastructure. If you're a start up or a small company like [other person], it *may* make sense. For medium and large businesses, not so much.
It's all about fitting the infrastructure to the business model.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
HAHAHAHAHAHA.
Good luck with that. The cloud isnt some magical sphere everyone likes to pretend it is. Take google apps, say your company rebrands, so you think cool add secondary domain to google apps, slowly transition across people can send from both email addresses all good till you decide your ready to make the new domain primary ohh whats that, you can do it? You spend millions per year on advertising with google but your reps still say it cant be done? Welcome to the cloud. Their solution? remove the secondary domain, set it up as a new google apps account (meandwhile loosing email) re-purchase all the users accounts and then slowly migrate your email data across.
Yeah great. The cloud just neuters your IT departments ability to actually help out or resolve an issue themselves. All the same problems are pretty much there if not worse now shit really hits the fan when the internet is slow.
Me too, except without the Slashdot. Forget blackjack too.
Slightly more seriously, my experience doesn't bear out the article's premise. Posting anonymous because I'm about to admit some business stuff I don't really want associated with my name.
Our company pushed our email off onto a hosted system and everytime we have a problem now, it isn't my fault. I honestly think our IT department might have been able to provide a better service with better uptime, fewer service interruptions and for lower cost, but having it be "not my fault" makes it well worth the cost in time and money. We pushed our main servers onto a hosted provider, our main webservers onto a hosted service and piece by piece more and more of it is "not my fault."
Not my problem: Priceless
You know and I know that the bottom line should be about the reliability and value of the service. What I also know is that blaming some neblous third party means better sleep, less interdepartmental conflict and shorter days for me. In a way it actually makes sense for the company though, instead of my department handling all these problems and needing overtime and training, there are teams of people with at least some mimimal competence at other companies handling them.
The IT business loves its fads. Remember client/server? Remember when green screens were passe and everything had to be rewritten as a GUI? Remember when Novell Networking was all the rage? Remember when IBM's Systems Application Architecture (SAA) was hot stuff? Remember when COBOL then Java was going to be platform-independent and displace all other languages? Remember when everything was going to be outsourced to India, then Brazil? Remember when Unix then .NET was going to rule the world? Remember CompuServe, AOL and Prodigy, each ignoring the coming Internet?
.net are still here.
IT loves its fads, but then it gets tired and moves on to the newest shiny thing. Cloud computing is no different; this fad shall pass. But part of the fad will still be with us; after all, both Unix and
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
I wonder if this "fear the cloud" meme comes from the possibility that companies will be able to handle their IT needs without actually hiring any IT people? The office I work in is seriously considering moving into a tiny office suite with enough room for just a few people and the rest of us will telecommute. In support of this idea I've been pushing the use of Google Apps for Business.
I'm just wondering, but are IT people afraid of "the cloud" the way that autoworkers are afraid that their factories will be moved to the 3rd world?
-- QED
you could think of this a different way. From the perspective of your employer they can get an awesome email system with support, applications, and remote back-up for $12,000/year. freeing you up to do the things that aren't best left to a system like that, software development for instance. Turning a one man IT department into something that's multiples better for 10%-15% of the cost of an extra worker.
it's government sponsored IT infrastructure centralization to deal with the "terrorists".
If it's only one customer upset enough about the problem then the $49.95 applies.
Even when it's as you've written above - that multiplied by all the customers on that server for instance, the care factor can still be close to zero. I've seen that with hotmail and a DNS configuration typo that put the email out of commission for a medium sized University among other customers, yet it was nearly a week before the problem came up in the queue to be fixed. The hosting provider didn't think it was likely that their customers would jump ship for a single outage like that, thus they expected zero financial repercussion, thus a care factor of close to zero.
So instead of having a problem, you have a problem with a bit more plumbing. Except that your plumbing is everyone else's plumbing. Business has a very bad habit of being clubby. Fred and Barney are doing X, we should do X too (or at least look at doing X). What's the problem with playing follow the leader? If there is one "best case way" of delivering Z, and we all do it the same way, and something along the 'best case way' fails, then we all fail to deliver Z. So we panic, and all talk about "oh my gosh, disaster!!!". And it can be a financial crisis, or an energy crisis, or a sub-prime mortgage thing, or a bank failure, or damn near anything else. Its purely market driven, and the market tanks from time to time. The market also doesn't take into account in how fragile a state it leaves customers. Security for customers isn't an afterthought, it receives absolutely no thought at all. Even in the transition to IPV6 it seems everyone wanted to wait for "a significant threshold of" other users before they consider changing. Going to the cloud, you put all your eggs in their basket. You don't control the basket. If anything happens to the basket, you are screwed. If someone else grabs the basket, they can sell your precious data (we are talking about illegal acts, but there is always a gap between how precious data is to you, versus how precious the people running the basket think of your data). I've never thought the cloud was a good idea. Off site backup is great. Storing everything offsite is not a good idea.
Adopt or I will be happy to step in and help your management do it without you. Running services in the cloud does not mean you do not have to address backups, change management, disaster recovery, monitoring etc.
It does however mean I don't need to maintain hardware and networking gear including the FTE's required for those task.
The IT landscape shifts yearly adapt or get out of the way.
Got Code?
Get your company's lawyers involved in negotiating with "cloud" providers. Make sure all the things that the "cloud" provider can screw up result in substantial financial penalties. Lawyers are paid to prepare for contingencies like that. If a "cloud" provider won't agree to enforceable service agreements, price out business interruption insurance coverage for the cloud provider's failure. Now you have a backup plan and costing for it.
http://dilbert.com/fast/2011-01-07/
Linux/Unix = fast. But only for smart people.
Who cares about Google's Apps, beyond a functional example of an application deployed to their cloud?
We're not talking about using Google's Apps, rather we're talking about deploying our OWN custom applications. We're talking about transforming the idea of a physical data center to a virtual one.
If I need 5 servers to run my application I could find U10 of rack space in a data center somewhere, buy a bunch of hardware, rack it in, cable it up, install the OS, prereqs, etc.
Or...I could click "deploy" and have all of that happen in 60 seconds. Including live, hot failover DR for both data and systems, CDN, etc. And doing it for literally pennies compared to traditional datacenter deployment. What's not to love? (unless you're a sys admin or other IT support drone).
Cloud deployments are a complete no-brainer for nearly every application. The only exception at this point (and it won't be for long) are applications in PCI scope.
My
We found it was easier to just print internal company documents and tape them to the windows facing outward.
http://dilbert.com/fast/2011-01-07/
Linux/Unix = fast. But only for smart people.
I learn someting useful every goddamn day. Fucking thanks.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
I hate to break it to you but the "cloud" has always been the room that isn't your desktop. Yes it's that simple. This time it's all offsite. It's the cycle of data throughput(How quickly can you get the data to the user). What people fail to realize is that it is just a cycle of networking. When the network bandwidth gets full it will be back in house again. It's all about network bandwidth. People think they are smarter now, they are not. The "cloud" would have been used 40 years ago if we had the same bandwidth then as we do now. Fuck the "cloud". PHBs will never understand. The "cloud" sounds great until you realize you have to upgrade the trunk lines to your office building. Look at all the money we saved! In the end it's PHB and accountants pushing numbers around and chasing fads to make themselves look good.
I have to agree. This summary is well.
I really love club dresses ,
Instead of being a skilled professional with power to change things and work on a problem, when you go to the cloud you demote yourself to a gopher
That is the point. As a manager I am looking to reduce costs. Why would I pay an engineer $80k/year to manage our infrastructure when I can pay an MSP to supply the same service for $10k/year? Maybe I then hire a $30k/year helpdesk 'gopher' to be the gateway between users and MSP support and I save 50% off my budget while delivering the same service. Cloud isn't the answer for everything, but for a lot of cases it is a lot more cost effective way of delivering IT.
If it's a sever that you rent, which might be virtual, then why not call it a rental [virtual] server?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Not everyone is a manager, that is OUR point. The world doesn't revovle around you. No disrespect.
As far as the cloud goes you are trusting your company's information to people who don't have any ties to your company. As others have mentioned, when things go wrong your complaint is just one among many...........that is how much they will care. You get what you pay for.
I think that's a part of it. But only for those "Baron Von Raisedfloor", technology preventer, homo-club IT types. Those guys who build IT practices and policies so as to make themselves seem invaluable and put-upon at all times. Your Nick Burns, Sr. types. They fear losing all the warm machines and being able to barge into people's offices.
Yes, this is a good point.
I'm thinking of a small law firm. They use a very common practice management application. It frequently chokes on a 1 Gbps network with only a couple of dozen users. Now put it in the cloud.
How much are you saving to install a 1Gbps internet connection(if you could even get such a thing) with no QoS or SLAs of any kind? Yea, productivity seems cloudy. And, that's one single application.
OK. You're talking about SDN. While it is a fundamental leap forward in configuration management, it shifts the responsibility of knowing how the hell the network is put together from network engineers and admins to programmers. Those "five lines of XML" (Just in time for JSON to completely take over) represent features offered by the network, storage and/or virtualization systems, each with a =vast= domain of knowledge. Can your system tune itself for distributed database performance based on your application? Of course it can't. Oracle and IBM have been trying for 35 years. ("NoSQL" vendors have gone from "next big thing" to "the new standard to replace the obsolete RDBMS" to "a valuable component in a larger infrastructure" to "Hey, everyone, let's go do NewSQL now!" in less than half a decade.) Howabout load balancers? Take a look at a F5 or Fortibalance manual lately? Application-specific firewalls from Imperva? Client compliance and patching systems from Juniper?
It's possible to push these decisions to "the cloud", but they will be simple default configurations that will fall over and die, and when you contact the "cloud" vendor, solutions will be expensive - optimization for reliability and performance takes money, time and manpower, in-house or outsourced. Also, now that manpower has to be both a network/database engineer =and= a software developer, and those five lines of XML sure bred like bunnies, didn't they? So now the configuration needs to be integrated into a development workflow, and sent through QA (a specialized QA who knows about modern load balancing and database optimization) and then through the compliance tools and possibly a manual audit.
I'm not saying SDN isn't the way forward - it clearly is - I'm saying it's barely keeping up with advances in technology, and in no position to obsolete anyone in the IT department. Silver Bullets are, as ever, a myth.
Note however that the vast majority of corporations outsource handling something particularly valuable to them to an external company: Their money. I don't think there are many companies which don't have their money handled by a bank, instead of doing it themselves. Indeed, this is true not only for companies, but also for most ordinary people.
So their daily cash transactions are all handled by a bank and not their in house accountants or clerks?
Cheap storage VM.
In my case, it's less a fear of job outsourcing and more a fear that those moving the infrastructure don't understand what they are giving up. The "cloud" makes sense in some cases and I make use of it myself, but a private "cloud" is often better with lower costs. Use the right tool for the right job, don't try to take your lug nuts off with a screw driver because it's shiny and someone you know did it.
Cheap storage VM.
Once you kick everything to the cloud, a monkey could run the infrastructure. There is no such thing as a client-side cloud operational specialist. You don't configure when to upgrade, alter, or even reboot the servers that you don't own or have any control over. A secretary could run it. Basically if you're going to be a company's "cloud operator" then you better have a 2nd degree in marketing or sales or learn janitorial services really fast.
I've worked in corporate cultures in my career where what you just posted about the cloud would cause nearly all middle level managers to adopt cloud-based computing immediately. Why? Because their corporate culture was such that you always needed to have someone to blame. They WANT someone to blame...as long as it doesn't involve taking responsibility for their own screw-ups. Contracting, sub-contracting, outsourcing, you name it...if you did not have an external entity to point your finger at and say "it's all their fault," your career was over.
I've been amazed at the number of people in that culture that are still employed by those corporations. But then again, look at how well the auto industry has done in the last 10 years. Grateful to have gotten out of that industry years ago...
Responsible (in one way or another) for rain, thunder, lightning, tornadoes, hurricanes, typhoons, fog, etc.
And you want to put your entire IT structure in one.
LMAO! Multi-layer security? Responsibility? Please...(LOL!)...STOP...(LOL!)...Yer killin' me!!
And with "cloud computing" you can ship all your technical needs overseas, where it will naturally be safe and secure.
Face it, it's just another excuse for businesses to get rid of the little people so
that the bigwigs can pay themselves bigger salaries and the "cloud" managers less.
And just like clouds, your data is on a firm foundation...hot air.
This is going to be SO good when it comes crashing down.
I wonder if this "fear the cloud" meme comes from the possibility that companies will be able to handle their IT needs without actually hiring any IT people? The office I work in is seriously considering moving into a tiny office suite with enough room for just a few people and the rest of us will telecommute. In support of this idea I've been pushing the use of Google Apps for Business. I'm just wondering, but are IT people afraid of "the cloud" the way that autoworkers are afraid that their factories will be moved to the 3rd world?
As a veteran IT guy, I am blissfully unconcerned about being superannuated because of hosted apps/hosted servers/software as a service/etc. There will always be a need for (no, a shortage of) quality IT people. The people who need to be concerned are those who cannot or will not adapt to changes in both technology and in the business climate.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
Outsource everything to India, colocate everything to Cloud.
Either turn Indian, or start working at the cloud provider.
Point I want to make: If you are a IT person working at a company where IT is _not_ buessnies critical, maybe it's better for you to work at a company where it is.
Cloud is great for 'Peters Bending Pipes' Company, Outsourcing is perfect for 'I Really Do Not Care Software Development' Company.
If you work at a company that do care about software quality, and where IT is buessnies critical, they will not outsource your position and they will not colocate your servers. (Sorry people from India, your are good workers, but in the outsourcing scenario there is a lack of local domain knowledge when transfering work).