The rush to the cloud has begun. That could be a good thing—but only if we take the time to learn from the lessons of the past.
Think back to the x86 proliferation in the mid-1990s. With x86 machines suddenly more affordable and robust, and with Internet use becoming widespread, consumers saw a chance to speed their time to market. Why wait 12-18 months for central IT to get a new application up and running, they figured, when they could do it themselves in a matter of weeks?
Naturally, they went for it. The result was massive IT disruption: sprawling, unmanageable infrastructures, insecure data, information silos. It took years, and a lot of money, to try to sort it all out.
Fast forward to today. With the advent of cloud computing, we are on the cusp of another extensive IT transformation. Once again, consumers of IT resources have the opportunity to get what they need cheaper, faster, and with more control. With the public cloud, they can provision a server in minutes and pay for only what they consume. Naturally, they’ll want to go for it.
This actually could be good for everyone: most of the workloads running in the public cloud are the kind CIO’s should be glad to get rid of. If the big enticement to go to public cloud is the pay-as-you-go format, it follows that most of these are on-again, off-again workloads—in other words, they are unpredictable and volatile. These are two words that don’t fit into the clean definitions we like to put around service level guarantees. CIOs should look forward to off-loading them.
The problem is that there are some workloads that shouldn’t leave the premises—data that contains intellectual property, that needs to be protected for regulatory and compliance reasons, or that contains private information. If consumers are free to shift everything to public cloud, without policies and audit processes to guide them, the disruption will be costly.
The cloud is coming and, just as they did in the mid 1990’s, the consumers of IT resources will force the issue. But we don’t have to re-live the mistakes of the past. There are steps you can take today to prepare your organization for a safe, orderly, and effective transition to this new IT paradigm.
More on that—and on the importance of bringing everyone into the conversation—in my next post.
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