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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.
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.
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?
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.
--
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.