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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.
The first call comes from the technical people, and answers the question "Is the company technically able to move to the cloud, and if not what's required to get it to that point?". Once you've got that covered, then business can decide whether it makes sense to move and whether they want to invest what it'll take to make it happen. If it isn't technically possible it doesn't matter how much business wants it, and business can't make a determination about investing what's needed to make it possible if they don't know how much investment it'll take. You can't make a cost/benefit decision if you don't know the cost.
Honestly both should be involved. Anyone proposing a solution should be prepared to back that solution up when presenting it to others. I have seen Management make some really absolutely stupid decisions relating to software and platforms, but I have seen the Techie side do the same.
You mean you have stuff that isn't in the Cloud yet? What rock are you operating under?
Like most things in life, decisions are made in collaboration. CEO wants "cloud", but when the CFO explains the regulatory risk, he finally gets it. IT folks might want to move "to the cloud" to pad their resume, but management doesn't want to spend the money on retooling/retraining/migrating (yes, there are costs beyond cloud costs in migrating).
People should talk, and see what makes sense. Like most decisions a corporation makes.
It's hard to explain who exactly should be in charge but IT staff should propose several solutions, their costs attached to it and the cost/benefits. There is never one solution and neither is 'cloud' a solution in and by itself. In the end, unless you're a small shop or require very small amounts of something, the 'cloud' is almost never the answer.
If you have 10 e-mail accounts, a hosted provider may look promising, but if you end up paying more for an e-mail solution in a month than you'd do buying your own hardware, you're doing it wrong.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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.
If you can't have a rational discussion between your architects (who are most likely just really senior guys slinging code) and your product managers (who are most likely just sales and account reps without a market vision) you are already screwed.
Shit. I just described my own company.
Technical management evaluates the options based on the requirements, and makes recommendations. BizMGNT shit-cans the recommendation in favor of whatever buzz-word technology is in vogue. Engineers implement the technologies chosen scratching their collective heads as to how this meets any of the initial requirements;. AND they have to engineer supporting infrastructure with no budget, and even less time to make pager-duty tolerable. At least that's how it's worked in my experience. Someone who doesnt have to answer the phone at 2am gets to decide.
CIOs/CTOs are hopefully technical in a company that has these needs, and they'll also hopefully consult with their people for these kinds of questions. If they're not capable or willing to do both, the company has more pressing concerns than where to host its stuff.
(Plenty of tech companies have bad CIOs or CTOs).
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
First, "techies" is like calling a manager a "flunky". Insulting.
Second, this has to be a 2 way conversation. The #1 benefit of "Cloud" is cost scope control - you can't customize it so business has a hard line instead of pushing IT for endless enhancements. As for "can or can't", provide managers rough estimates and high level todo's as to what it'll take to get there. There is never "we can't", there's "it'll cost this much" which will make then choke and chose a wiser path.
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've also worked for companies where such decisions were made by solely by the CIO. The CIO in one of the cases was not a technical person, and got the CIO position because of whom he knew.
The success of the project seemed to be directly related to the amount of discussion and information exchange among the "hands on" technicians and management (including business management).
The more discussion and information exchange, the better the outcome of the project.
Tell people that instead of saying "in the cloud" they say "on somebody else's computer" and see how that goes--
"We store the company's most important information on somebody else's computer"
"We control access to that data by storing it on somebody else's computer"
"We back up all our mission-critical information to somebody else's computer"
"Our data is secure because we store it on somebody else's computer"
Doesn't sound so good, eh?
makes the call.
Next silly question?
Sure, the person who pays the bills makes the call but they usually make that call based on cost. If it costs less in hardware/support/security/reliability/etc.. to move to the cloud, then it's usually a safe bet to do it. In most organizations, the person paying the bill would ask the IT department for costs and make the decision based on that. In the company I work for, we only have a few servers and by moving to the cloud we have a fixed bill, a reduced workload, no need to replace hardware, more reliability, etc... Once we found a good provider, there was really no downside. On a side note, our first attempt to move to amazon was a disaster and we have been much happier with stormondemand. The cloud isn't a single entity and each provider has different offerings and what works for one company might not work for the next so the whole vague "move to the cloud" is almost as useless as saying you need to buy a server or a network. You need to spec it out the same way you would spec out an in-house server, network device, or ISP connection and weigh all the pros/cons.
It's not necessarily that so much as the head honchos usually have grandiose visions that are short sighted.
For that reason, and others, IMO it is best to follow the typical procedures one does in typical successful IT project management, which may sound bureaucratic, but it avoids disasters, thus these are pretty common procedures for a very good reason:
i.e:
1) Problem statement: Why is what we're currently doing insufficient?
2) Do a productivity gap analysis: Where are we now, where do we want to be?
3) Does the proposed solution provide for long term growth (so that we don't have to ask these questions again in only a few years)?
4, 5, 6, etc, etc,
But along the way, never leave out this important step: Consult with all of the stakeholders and make sure this solution works for them early in the design phase to figure out if this solution is even worth pursuing.
The stakeholders often include: Upper management, middle management, lower management, the techies, the rank and file employees, the customers, and sometimes the shareholders.
When you consult with them, what you're looking for are things like this: Does this new system work better than the old one? Does the new system make your job more difficult in any way? Does the system make your job easier in any way? What do you like about it? What don't you like about it? What else do you think you may need? (On that last question, make sure to have well defined scope limits early on to avoid feature creep.)
I remember at one place I worked, somebody higher up decided that they wanted to move all of the sales department to Microsoft Dynamics CRM some time before I first worked there. One day while I was asked to troubleshoot a problem with it, (and believe me, MS CRM has TONS of bugs) and I was totally stumped because this person's account didn't work even though his permissions were the same as everybody else's. After I did some investigation, I found out (and the management wasn't even aware) that every salesperson had this problem, only very few of them even tried to use MS CRM at all, so nobody actually reported it until this one guy happened to try it a few years after we had already supposedly been using it.
That's a classic example of when somebody implemented a new "IT system" but completely failed to consult with the rank and file employees to see if it's something they'd even want to use at all. It's also one of many classic examples of failed IT project management.
TL;DR: Basically, everybody who it applies to should have a say in it.
True indeed... painfully true in many cases.
That said, remember that even though the CIO (and/or directors, etc) are easily swooned by vendors, consider this: One expensive fuck-up at the strategic level can destroy a career in less time than it takes for the CFO (or someone similar) to lodge a complaint in the boardroom, the first massive security incident, the first major outage... (and if you think the CIO is taking the heat for it, you're insane... that's why he drags a director or two into the process.)
That's why you don't (usually) see some CxO tromping up to a podium to announce "We're putting all our shit on the cloudz and it will be the awesomes!" without a metric shit-ton of consultation with (and agreement from) the rest of the C-level types. Oh *hell* no... first, he's going to drag the beancounters into it, and make them take part in the decision (if only to share the blame). Then he's gonna pile on the justifications (vendors will supply a lot of it, but if there is insufficient in-house justification, it's usually no-go), and make sure there's enough names on that thing to share the blame (but not enough to bury his getting the credit for it.)
All that said... no IT honcho worth his salt is going to do any of this without at least some input from a trusted sysadmin/developer/etc or two... if you think he did such a thing arbitrarily, then he's either flamingly incompetent, or that trusted person is definitely not you (or you're probably not high enough in the food chain, haven't sufficiently proven yourself, etc.)
PS: Fun bit about the whole deadline thing once a decision is made. He told the C-level guys 18 months as an ETA, but told the director to get it done in 6 months. By the time it filters down to you a day later, you got 6 weeks to complete it, and no weekends or vacations until it's done. :/
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I am lucky to have worked for some darn good companies when it comes to security.
However, the problem is most firms I've encountered have top brass that believe that security has no ROI [1], and going to the cloud has a ton of PR benefit, from the talk about tossing the data center, to not having to have tons of low level admins to yank hard drives, rack/unrack equipment.
Combine that with the fact that a single cloud provider has yet to have been breached, usually makes the CEO/CTO push for a cloud solution, stat.
[1]: When I ask about the intrusion scenario, the business I was interviewing at said, "we just call Tata or Infosys, and they will fix it."
In my view, nobody should comment on whether anything should be on-premises or not, if they are unable to distinguish between the word "premises" and "premise." Laziness of the tongue or of the quill is not an excuse.
It's senior management's call unless they request otherwise. Maybe the obvious on-prem location is closing abruptly, and senior management isn't allowed to announce that yet. Or maybe the cloud decision has already been made by a competent IT team of an unannounced acquiring company. Unsolicited technical objections might be, at best, a waste of time.
Yep. Them dang magazines. Or them dang online "executive" websites. Often, "cloud" isn't an intelligent decision arrived at from collaboration between all concerned parties, as well-detailed in the earlier posts, it's "somebody's boss read a magazine article or saw something on the WSJ site," and next thing you know, the commandment comes down: WE MUST GO TO THE CLOUD, even though nobody involved in the issuance of the commandment even knows what the fuck "the cloud" actually IS. Or what it isn't.
Been through it many times. Every sortsighted headstrong exec who reads magazines hands down A Commandment:
We're Going Client-Server
We're Going Object-Oriented
We're Going Groupware
We're Going To Quality Circles
We're Going To Mobile
We're Going To The Cloud
They're a bunch of 5th graders worried they're missing The Next Cool Thing. They want the Pokemon, the Teddy Ruxpin, the Furby, THE COOL NEW TOY even if they get bored with it by the time they go back to school after Christmas. But in this case, everyone in the organization suffers for their fetish.
I mean, ask your friends.
"You guys putting things in the cloud?"
"Yeah."
"Why?"
"Management said we had to."
"Why?"
"Man, shut up. You already owe me a beer."
They know. You know. "Cloud" is just another fad. A new bandwagon. Some organizations can benefit from it. A lot cannot. But when you get edicts from on high, absent a rational review (again, as ably described in other posts in this thread), well, you're fuXX0red before you even start, because your organization is doing something because "somebody said so," and not necessarily because it's needed or useful.
---------------------------------------
Rotate the pod, please, HAL....
I'm just going to leave this here: https://www.google.com/#q=aws+outage+history
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Having worked my way up through every level, the biggest thing I've learned is "correct" is amassively subjective concept, based on value statements people at other levels don't see.
To take a deliberately simple case:
I would have declared a manager insane for buying Office365 licenses. After all, you can buy copies outright for less.
Except, as that manager, any savings I get are dwarfed by the pain in the ass of keeping licensing info. Some idiot loses the info and you're out far more than the difference when you have to re-buy. Or you don't re-buy and you're vulnerable to huge fines. Or you have someone dot every i and cross every t and you pay more for their salary than you save. Or Office365 keeps everyone licensed and demonstrably so.
Same goes for commenting.
Earlier in my career, commenting was slow. I could understand my code just fine without it. It was clearly readable after all. What idiot manager wants less productive code after I jumped through hoops?
Now I've paid the price of countless devs who write code no one else can follow. If watched countless more declare they have to rewrite everything because the previous guy who swore his code was readable wrote something the next guy swears is not. My perspective is completely different. I'd now rather each person codes a little slower so the company moves faster overall.
Who's right? Everyone has a good perspective but each is colored by the values that they weigh in.
I know my devs often think my calls are "wrong" because they assign different values to those I do... But I also know I've been put in the position exactly because I have the perspective I do. The best I can do is try to explain and help them understand, listening when they genuinely see something I've missed.
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.
The Kazakhstan problem goes like this..
You can't tell where your cloud computing is hosted. Any host can delegate to some other host.
So Vendor A with well paid shiny sales people sells cloud hosting.
Vendor A outsources the physical part of the cloud to Vendor B who is a bit cheaper with slightly less well paid sales people. Vendor A cashes the difference.
Vendor B outsources to vendor C in China who is cheaper still. Vendor B cashes the difference.
C -> D
D -> E
Repeat a few times until all the world's cloud computing it running on a server in a cupboard in Kazakhstan.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I was going to say pretty much the same thing!
I've been a consultant for close to 20 years and I'm AMAZED by the decisions made by high level executives based solely on a sales pitch or based on the advice of a family member or friend that 'knows about computers and stuff'.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law - Aleister Crowley
>better performing for less
Enterprise-class hardware? Maybe if you're overpaying for it.
If you owned the same hardware that amazon does, it would be cheaper and faster than running it on amazon's VMs. Faster for the obvious reason that you're running on bare metal and not inside a VM, and cheaper because Amazon wouldn't profit if their income from renting VMs was less than what they spent on hardware. Check the price of renting a big VM for 3 years versus buying the equivalent real hardware.
None of this is to suggest that there aren't other benefits to using VMs. Like you said, resilience and monitoring. Someone else's grunts are dealing with the hardware instead of you.
If you do it right, you should be able to guarantee some base load that will keep some computers busy. Buy those and run the system on it. Then use the cloudy servers to scale up as variable load happens. The cloud stuff isn't cheaper unless you are avoiding paying for idle hardware.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
The "techies" should submit a report, in writing, outlining the implications of a decision. No matter how much people hate writing reports, it does have a degree of accountability that casual consultations do not have. The writer is more inclined to provide both the benefits and the drawbacks of the decision as well as providing the rationale for approving or rejecting the decision. Documentation also forces accountability on senior management, since they have information upon which to base their decision. This is information that they have to take to their bosses if called upon.
This is not to say that the techies will agree with the outcome, but it can soften the blow. I have certainly written proposals for things that I did not approve of, but it was better than their alternative. (That original plans would have resulted in my resignation since they were planning to do something illegal. The alternative accepted their goals, but brought them in line with the law.))
If you read the question to the end, you would know. The next question is then "and who should".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There's a simple answer:
Get a techie into the position of CIO.
It's the C*Os job to make those strategic descisions and these should be based on experience. So have a techie as CIO and your MBA as CEO. And don't mix them up.
bickerdyke
Who should make the call to take any corporate data to the cloud? That answer is simple. The CSO.
Who usually does end up making the call to take corporate data to the cloud? That answer is unfortunately simple too.
It's usually anyone other than a CSO, with the end result being the justification as to why you need one.
Of course it is easy to show how blind management is, However it IT guys are not blame less.
IT has a history of the following bad behavior, that would make management want to find a way to slim its IT Staff.
1. Personal pet projects: This is often a business related project, however there are alternatives that may work better, however it IT worker is too emotionally interested in keeping it going, then giving it up for a better solution. Hanging on to the couple features that has that the others do not.
2. Attempts to make you "Irreplaceable": Sure that program your infrastructure you support is impressive, and perhaps no one else currently will want to touch it with a ten foot pole, and it is your baby, that is keeping the organization running. However in case of accidental death or injury the company is in a bad place, so they will want a better solution. And BTW just because people don't want to touch it, if they have to they can and will be able to maintain it, no matter how hard you make it.
3. Failing to project in the future: If they move to a cloud service, then your job is antiquated. However have you been future proofing yourself. Realizing the role you need to take after that particular feature moves away?
Now I am not trying to blame us IT guys for every stupid business decision... However you need to realize our personal bad behaviors do get noticed up, and influences business decisions.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Often the Rouge deployments is due IT not being responsive enough or letting other departments behind while focusing more on others.
Those IT Guys they don't like us Sales folks, the engineering groups gets all the new technology while we get this old stuff. Well we have a budget we will subscribe to this web site that does what we wanted and tried to request for software for year, but was ignored by IT.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Thats an easy one. This one happens like all the rest, as usual: Marketeers decide without asking the Techies. Techies have to solve issues in record time with no say.
When all comes crashing down, the techies save the day with the secret auto-backup they've been pulling off the cloud for the last 6 months.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
How a plan becomes policy
Ce n'est pas une signature automatique.
I always rather liked Bleu deployments... Rouge is so.... Moulin!
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Some costs can be hidden from that deciding person. Or greatly understated.
I've seen that time and again.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
. The cloud stuff isn't cheaper unless you are avoiding paying for idle hardware.
Er, that is the whole point of AWS. It is charged by load, so you scale up and down as required, therefore never paying for idle hardware. The AWS model wins because they extract 100% of every piece of hardware, while most on-prem shops would be lucky to get 10%. AWS is going to take over the world. You heard it here first.
I have spent hundreds (if not thousands) of hours cleaning up the carnage of #1
...if they have the sophistication to model the actual costs of the various options in a comprehensive way that includes deciphering the hazy costs associated with cloud hosting itself (availability options, CPU options, storage costs etc), premise costs (upgraded Internet access with true secondary path), migration costs (can some systems be just P2V'd to a cloud hosting provider or does it involve a platform switch and/or upgrade?), impact on staffing, general in-house implementation from a desktop perspective, etc, as well as longer-term contingency costs like deciding it doesn't work and needing to migrate back.
And then do the same for premise hosted systems, and then compare for reasonable lifetime of ownership (3-5 years).
Many IT people could probably do this themselves but Finance doing this would be smarter since they have access and understanding of other business cost dynamics. And it helps do it as in-depth as possible.
But it depends on the definition of finance and how sophisticated they are. My experience lately has been a surprising number of cloud adopters going back to on premise for a lot of things because they found cloud to be expensive and when they looked at what they actually ended up paying versus what it had cost them to do it on site found on site to be cost competitive and have flexibility that cloud lacked.
This leads me to believe that cloud pricing is very opaque and these organizations didn't do a lot of cost modeling, somebody heard cloud and some kind of $19.95/month sales pitch and mentally compared that to the last IT infrastructure invoice they paid.
Cloud is like outsourcing, as in a) it'll be a management decision that b) won't save that much money and c) will result in less efficient business processes. 'strategic perspective', do you mean what the CIO just read in the non-technical press.
Corporate level risk decisions like this the final decision has to rest with a C-Level executive. If he is a good manager of course he will get input from other people first then make the decision. The eventuality that the corporation cloud service is hacked or compromised ... they will have to answer to the owners or the shareholders anyways.
Personally, I would be extremely wary of allowing any corporate data to be "housed" in a cloud unless they have deep pockets are can be held liable for damages caused by a major breach.
All I will say to this is; What happens in the Cloud, does not stay in the Cloud. Then tell the boss to ask Ashley Madison. I'm betting their site was in the cloud. They say something like "there's 38,920,000 anonymous reasons".
In other words, good management should be smart enough to take everything into account. Without that, the company is rather screwed.
So if you were implying its always down, your link doesn't back up your implication.
Yep, you got it. I was implying that AWS is always down. Always. No exceptions. Never running.
Good job.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
We used to call them System Analysts. They were seen as dinosaurs and nobody needed them anymore. They became extinct.
HANDS OFF!!, my pretty...
Cheap storage VM.
Of course it is easy to show how blind management is, However it IT guys are not blame less.
IT has a history of the following bad behavior, that would make management want to find a way to slim its IT Staff.
1. Personal pet projects: This is often a business related project, however there are alternatives that may work better, however it IT worker is too emotionally interested in keeping it going, then giving it up for a better solution. Hanging on to the couple features that has that the others do not.
Strangely, my experience has been that our devs test-driving "the cloud" has made them appreciate the level of support they get from the in-house IT even more. Almost without fail, every dev team has gone through a phase of "ooh! we can pop up a server without waiting on IT!" Followed by "This isn't *exactly* what we need, and we can't change it from the canned offerings," and "hey, IT support us! Sorry, we can't do anything for you past general advice, you have to work with $CLOUD_VENDOR." And eventually, they come back in-house where we can give them what they need, and have a team of subject-matter experts that can immediately jump on any problems.
Of course, we're fortunate not to have the IT dept staffed entirely by imbeciles, which probably makes a big difference.
...and by moving to the cloud we have a fixed bill...
...and by moving to the cloud we think we have a fixed bill...
FTFY
Cheap storage VM.
One thing that gets me in discussions across organizations is how poorly the "cloud" is defined. IT often has a slightly different definition of the cloud than senior management than end users than tech support (and so on). Are we moving email to the cloud, setting up a collection of virtual servers to run our custom apps on, using Salesforce, creating a hybrid solution for redundancy? Even in those situations, the motivations and concerns are often different.
Then there's the accounting aspect. Is the shift simply to move IT from CapEx to OpEx? Does the IT staff understand the difference? Has management worked out a 3 year forecast to make sure the financials actually work out?
When making these decisions, all major stakeholders need to be involved and represented. You need to look at it from different perspectives and make sure everyone understands those perspectives. Only then can you really make an informed decision. Yes, that's much more difficult than simply believing the sales guy, but for something as important as IT infrastructure, it's what you should do.
I work on the laboratory informatics/gene sequencing side of the world and these conversations are becoming more common. To help give scientists some perspective, I've putting together some blog posts that introduce all the different angles:
https://www.lab7.io/is-your-he...
Yes, it's a bit of shameless self-promotion, but it's also relevant to the discussion (and I don't want to just cut-and-paste it here :) ).
-Chris
Our organization recently decided to go with Microsoft Dynamics Online. We (IT) didn't really get much of a say in it.
However, what we did was use the initiative as a platform for our own move to expand the cloud deployments from just CRM users to all users.
We are now well on our way to migrating off of on-prem Exchange and a mixed Office 2003 - 2010 environment to an Office 365 solution.
So, in effect, we took an project spearheaded by sales and turned it into a benefit for all users.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
FTFY
How do you figure? We now have a monthly fee that is the same each month versus previously we had an initial outlay of several thousand dollars per server, ongoing costs of hardware repairs, and then another outlay a few years later for new servers. Yes, if you don't have a contract then the monthly fee can possibly go up but it usually just tracks inflation and is much more fixed and steady than owning your own servers. You can argue that it's more expensive, it's less secure, or a host of other things but I honestly can't see how you can argue that the bill isn't fixed. I can show you our bill for the past 2 plus years and it is definitely the same every month.
Well, #1 and #3 come under technical "Can we do it?", at least the parts where the company has the technical ability to switch providers if one goes out of business and to handle connectivity problems (I classify a provider going out of business as just a particularly severe and long-term connectivity problem, communications with their systems is completely down and won't ever be back up). The rest is all business decisions, the same sort business makes about every external vendor the company does business with. Legal issues in particular aren't something IT should be involved in, the company pays real lawyers to advise the business on that sort of thing and if I as a techie know more about the legal aspects than the lawyers something is really wrong.
Somewhere in their billing structure is a gotcha. You haven't hit it yet.
It could be higher loads, it could be when you need something quickly.
Cheap storage VM.
Somewhere in their billing structure is a gotcha. You haven't hit it yet.
It could be higher loads, it could be when you need something quickly.
Why so pessimistic? Believe it or not, there are plenty of companies out there with straightforward upfront pricing that don't nickle and dime their customers and instead charge a fair price for their services.
Yes, if you need technical support for something that's not under contract, a company might charge you a reasonable hourly rate but believe it or not most companies aren't out to screw their customers. Especially where there is a lot of competition, it's hard to stay in business if you're always trying to squeeze your customers. It's a lot easier to make money if you just charge a fair price for a good service.
I am lucky to have worked for some darn good companies when it comes to security.
Ditto. I give thanks regularly that the business principals who run the company I work for get it, generally.
Combine that with the fact that a single cloud provider has yet to have been breached, usually makes the CEO/CTO push for a cloud solution, stat.
[1]: When I ask about the intrusion scenario, the business I was interviewing at said, "we just call Tata or Infosys, and they will fix it."
There may not have been any breaches of a "cloud provider", yet, but that's not really surprising. Honestly, the security posture of most cloud operations I've considered is superior to that of a damn lot of businesses who run their own stuff. So, in a cloud scenario, a breach from the host side of things is far less likely than from something on the guest/client side. There's a reason that AWS makes it extremely hard to get them to sign a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement, for example. They'll do it, because they know that their stack is solid, but not before you've satisfied them that what you plan on deploying on their stack is just as solid. Most things thrown up to the cloud don't get that kind of vetting, and not at all surprisingly, those same things get pwned with pretty much the same regularity as their non-cloud counterparts.
I swear if I ever meet the guy who decided that "the cloud" was something magical instead just another term for "someone else's servers", I'm going to... to... uh... pain! Lots of pain.
This isn't an either or scenario.
The tech team should be consulted to make sure any new solution is sufficiently compatible with existing ones. HOWEVER, they are just one of the stakeholders in the process: users will flat out reject anything thrown at them without consultation, business leaders may know about competing projects or business goals, and any major initiative is likely to trip over a handful of shadow IT projects.
The CIO needs to be the ultimate decision maker because they have the perspective to see all these things at once. They also have the authority to get rogue stakeholders in line, if need be. Without consulting the tech team first, any project is doomed to fail (or at least a very slow and painful success). Of course, that is in an IDEAL scenario. In reality, CIOs tend to be cowboys, other C-level execs tend to compete for authority and funds more efficiently, and cost-center mentalities can write off any IT project as a costly failure before it even starts. That's just getting started.
If you're having problems with the decisions your CIO makes, here's a trick I use - instead of proposing 1 or 2 solutions, propose as many livable solutions as layers of management will touch the proposal + 1. Everyone in the process likes to be a "decision maker" and will trim one option and send it upwards. By the time it reaches the CIO, it will have 2 options on the plate - which is exactly the type of binary decision that most C-levels like. This will get your proposal through upper management quicker, and still leave you with a decision you can live with. It works in many cases, but you will need the support of the other stakeholders, and of course YMMV.
In regards to the cloud - everything is a cloud. It's a matter of where the services need to live, and what amount of liability are you willing to coexist with. (Pro Tip: Liability can't be outsourced.)
Whoever has the guts to stand up to the marketing drones and tell them, "No".
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I always rather liked Bleu deployments... Rouge is so.... Moulin!
When two different posters used the term "rouge deployment" I assumed it was some new buzzphrase rather than a typo.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I was going to say pretty much the same thing! I've been a consultant for close to 20 years and I'm AMAZED by the decisions made by high level executives based solely on a sales pitch or based on the advice of a family member or friend that 'knows about computers and stuff'.
Unless you're talking about some one-man band operation, "high level executives" do not get to make major unilateral investment decisions based on random hunches.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Did not Heinlein write about techies vs. management in The Roads Must Roll?
Tracy Johnson
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BT