Cloud solutions are often presented as something completely new, where the rules of the games no longer apply. But that couldn't be more wrong! The same principles apply, it's just managed by a service contract instead of an internal team. That’s the big news!
You can find many parallels on this recent move to Cloud computing. Remember a time where households had to manage their own electricity supply, laundry, water or bread making, compared to the more industrial processes, created in response to the much higher demands of today’s society.
When managing complex systems on your own you will find many recurring problems:
Availability of resources
What if you wanted to implement a new feature is a MS Excel file, but you just don’t have anyone to do it and the business case/budget is too low to contract someone?
Risk
Depending on the size of your company, you may have certain critical functions managed by just one person. What if that person goes off sick, or just leaves? That’s a huge risk.
Keeping abreast of the industry
Having a small team, dedicated to an area internally, makes it difficult to release people for training to update their skills. Cloud providers will sell a service to a huge number of clients with revenue to support a bigger team, so they can always release someone to refresh their skills.In the end it is more efficient to manage IT resources centrally. In a cloud computing environment, there is ample computational power, and skills are maintained more efficiently for a wider base of users.
In my next blog I will explain how you still need a structure, typical of an old system, to manage the cloud. A team or individuals, not necessarily full time, with shift of focus from operation to governance and management.
