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Who Makes the Decision To Go Cloud and Who Should?
Esther Schindler writes: It's a predictable argument in any IT shop: Should the techies — with their hands on their keyboards — be the people who decide which technology or deployment is right for the company? Or should CIOs and senior management — with their strategic perspective — be the ones to make the call? Ellis Luk got input from plenty of people about management vs. techies making cloud/on-premise decisions... with, of course, a lot of varying in opinion.
I've found that whoever has a position of authority in the organization makes the call, usually after having spent far too much time under the influence of a sales rep that lavishes them with meals or outings like to play golf.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
There's no hard, fast answer, although it would probably be popular around here to assume that the right place is with the Tech dept. This is certainly supportable; I've seen plenty of clueless administrators blinded by blinking lights and flashy fluff make architecturally very poor choices!
At work, we are a vertical stack cloud-based software vendor. We work with hundreds of clients and deliver a very excellent product that saves our clients $$$. Several times now, I've seen IT departments that have ballooned into inefficient "candy stores" for developers who are mostly intent on increasing their take of the organization's $$. It mostly happens because the managers at our client organizations aren't techies in any sense of the word, so they take whatever techno mumbo jumbo blurted out by the techies as gospel.
When the powers that be at the organization bring us in, and ask the tech department, they are almost universally ice cold to the idea of working with us, as their job is potentially on the line. Change = BAD! And so we see a fight while the corrupt IT department and the management duke it out. We've lost a few, we've won most. In any case, we often come in as little as 1/5 the cost of the bloated, internal IT department's offerings, while offering better service, better security, and strongly worded privacy and availability clauses.
So there isn't a right answer, you know? Some CxOs are clueless or corrupt. Some IT departments are similarly incompetent or corrupt. It all really comes down to "people are people".
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Finance. finance declares after 4-6 quarters of overspending on marketing and travel that belts need tightening and austerity is upon us. ragged edge carpeting and burnt out sections of office that havent seen a new coat of paint or replaced bulbs since the Clinton administration are passed over and the finger is pointed squarely at the company to stop renting beamers for golf outings. IT staff with crispy mice and rubbery keyboards are glowered upon and in turn the management steps in, begrudgingly, and does what management does to get the harsh glare of 'why do you have 5 monitors' off the team. Clouds are looked at, RFQ's are drafted, 30 minute powwows with the team are conducted and the reigning PHB compiles a short-shot list of the top 3 potentials to outsource the companies infrastructure to at a greatly inflated cost savings.
then its up to "the business" which in turn will glaze over as 3 choices are paraded out and the one with the most ad-buy in the seatpocket magazines on the flight to shanghai the CEO had to memorize for 17 hours gets chosen. After 3/4ths of the infrastructure is hauled kicking and screaming into the cloud, BIS screams bloody murder and keeps their mainframe while the exchange instance now shits the bed once every week. bitchcraft from the business about slow access, lost data, weird permissions, unplanned outages and lack of any discernable support chain are summarily compiled into a ticket system and ignored as IT staff shuffle together the last mighty years of their work into a functional CV and start shoveling tradeshow trinkets from their desk into boxes 'just to clean up a bit.'
6 months later half the team bails, the last guy who knew how to handle multifactor stuffs a notebook full of scribblings into a managers mailbox, and "the cloud" suspiciously gains 3-4 new employees with an impeccable history of providing excellent service and designing robust systems.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I went through this.
Management and I met with the cloud salesperson and technical rep.
The tech rep was full of shit. When asked, he said response time would be FASTER. I objected on the grounds of the restriction of the speed of light.
Our current servers were in the next room via Ethernet.
The cloud was "out there."
I asked, "What fail-overs do you have?" They said that the cloud was in Austin and if it failed, Oklahoma would pick up the slack so fast, we wouldn't feel it.
After the meeting, I called the business number in Austin and asked for support. I got a kid and I asked him if the data center was there in Austin.
He said, "No, but we're thinking of building one."
I said, "How about the one in Oklahoma?" He said, "Cool. We have one in Oklahoma?"
Management loved the word, "cloud." "Cloud." "CLOUD."
It sounded good at cocktail parties and conference rooms and in front of clients.
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I recommended that we not go with those crooks and I laid it out very plainly, calmly and stuff.
Long story short ... I told management that my recommendation was on the record and that the IT department would certainly support any decision they made.
They took the bait.
6 months later and $60,000 down the road, I got the word to buy servers and switches and stuff to and to quietly duplicate all the stuff in our old computer room.
The cloud had gone down several times and there was no fail-over. It was slower than molasses and exceedingly expensive.
The blow that cracked the nut, though, was the long list of cloud hacks and the business (law) could not risk a breach by placing client data God knows where.
We're supposed to know where God put it, right?
We do now.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
At a previous employer, I got to see this whole turn of events unfold [the wrong person deciding to move to "The Cloud"]. It went something like this:
a) CEO (non-techie btw) gets wind of "The Cloud"
b) SalesForce.com reseller somehow gets past the call screeners and directly to the CEO's phone.
c) CEO flies to San Francisco to a "DreamForce" convention to see Sting perform and hear Colin Powell speak and hear Virgin and Coca Cola sing praises to the platform.
d) CEO signs up for 3 years of SalesForce.com and a bunch of addons without consulting anyone
e) CEO flies back and tells everyone (and I quote: "OK everyone, I'm driving this car down the street with no headlights on, hang on, here we go!")
Needless to say I was out of that place not soon after. It was a real shame to see this "Cloud" technology forced down everyone's throats on a whim of the CEO, when he had absolutely _zero_ input from anyone else in the company (IT or otherwise). Especially when we had a really good system in place that just needed a few tweaks to make it perfect.
My friend who still works there now as to run around like crazy coding a bunch of APEX scripts just to hold things together. It's a sad, sad mess unfortunately.
You clearly haven't run an email server in the past few years.
You are now required to utilize reverse (PTR) records on your IPs, DKIM and SPF records, run inbound and outbound SPAM filters.
Blacklists kill businesses. It is frustratingly time consuming to have to deal with getting an email from an executive with a "Fwd: Message failure, return to sender" in the subject.
Then, as an IT admin, you have to go and hunt down how to get your IP off that blacklist. Some are easier than others, some require faxing in a signed statement of what you as an admin have done to prevent the problem in the future.
Sometimes you get on blacklists because your datacenter provider has their whole /20 subnet blocked by Google or AOL because of one hacked wordpress site somewhere else in the datacenter.
Oh, but running my own from the office will solve all of that! Big fat NOPE.
Running one from your own office requires all of the above, plus segregating your email server from the rest of your internal network. Not to mention you'll need permission from your ISP because they'll need to unblock sending email from your IP(s). What happens if your email server stops responding in the middle of the night? Will you drive 2 hours to the office at 3AM to go deal with it?
$5/mo/account for Google Apps sounds really appealing all of a sudden.
(Source: I own a web hosting company)
Having worked my way up through every level, the biggest thing I've learned is "correct" is a massively subjective concept, based on value statements people at other levels don't see.
This pretty much sums up most Slashdot comments whenever the word management is used. Worker-bees are simply unaware of the complexities and conflicting demands that someone with responsibility faces. Instead of thinking hey that decision doesn't make sense, there most be more to it that I don't understand, the general reaction is, there's a decision I don't understand, that guy is a moron.
The ironic part is that by calling out the decision as stupid they are merely highlighting their own stupidity that they've failed to grasp the full nature of the problem.
TLDR Stupid people are usually too stupid to realise that they're stupid.