Impact Of Cloud On It Organizations

By Author: Susan Smith
Total Articles: 132
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IT teams today are dealing with the omnipresent concept of cloud. With almost everything today being offered as-a-service, people are consuming cloud services with the abandon of an alcoholic given access to an all-you-can-drink soiree. From iCloud to Cloud backups, employees are already using the ether in there personal lives, and they bring in the same trend to the workplace when they need something fast.

Benefits of Cloud

Fast – a developer, who does not want to wait for 2 weeks for the IT to provision a server for him to work, can spin off a machine on Amazon EC2 in minutes. Speed of provisioning and availability is a key USP for cloud. This is one of the main reasons traditional IT gets bypassed in favor of the cloud.

Cheap – for short-term usage, cloud services are much cheaper. Buying a server that you need for only a month for a few thousand dollars or leasing it for a couple hundred bucks; the choice is a no brainer. For long term usage though, Total cost of ownership (TCO) is cheaper for an in-premise solution.

Reliable – Most of the service providers have ...
... multiple layers of redundancy built into their systems. Therefore, cloud services a fairly reliable. However, there have been downtimes for popular cloud service providers.

Up-to-date – The service providers always like to keep their customers on the latest releases. This is not just because they care about them, its because the complexity of multiple versions results in support and management overheads that they want to avoid

Impact on IT

Complexity – Instead of having standardized environments protected behind the walls of their datacenter, IT now has to deal with systems without borders. The technology landscape looks very different, with newer architectures spawning out of the need for integrating systems inside the DC and out, and keeping the data transfer secure.

Lack of control – IT is losing control over not just the technology and platform choices of the users, but also their behavior. Traditionally IT has maintained a tight control over what the users could and could not do. Just like a convict completing his sentence, users are overzealous about the freedom that the cloud offers. They act very differently (and sometimes recklessly), knowing that the geeks from the basement cant control what they do.

Higher expectation – Another challenge that IT now faces is that the users are used to one-click-provisioning, on-the-go deployments, sub-second response times and mobility in their personal lives. The users now expect IT to deliver on the same metrics. This expectation is unrealistic as IT is limited by the technology and funds available to them. The geeks love technology more than the users do, but while the consumer pays a few hundred bucks to use it outside, IT will need a few millions to set it up internally.

Service provider to service aggregator – The role of IT has changed tremendously. Where it once was the creator and provider of technology services, it is now an aggregator of services, some of which are produced in-house, and some provided by external providers. For e.g. the intranet portal is run, managed, and supported by internal IT, while the service management tool may be provided by say Service-now.com. IT still owns the responsibility, but in reality, it is just service aggregation.

Different skillset – With the advent of the c-word, newer architectures like consolidated stacks have emerged. V-Block, UCS, Exadata etc. are a few examples of technology convergence. With these new architectures, newer skills are required. More cross-skilled, convergence engineers are replacing the traditional specialists.

The author is associated with, Copper Mobile, a well known app development solutions provider, iPhone developers in Dallas TX and mobile app development Dallas firm