If Your IT Department Operates It, It’s Not a Cloud
There is an old saying kicking around the cloudosphere that goes like this: “If it shows up on your loading dock, it’s not a cloud.” The statement is a general disparagement of the private and hybrid “cloud in a box” solutions hardware manufacturers have been promoting. As amusing as we might find the saying, it misleads by focusing on the wrong issue: the hardware. It doesn’t take Larry Ellison for us to realize the cloud is actually made up of physical hardware. So I’d like to improve on this saying with this: “If your IT department operates it, it’s not a cloud.”
I don’t have anything against corporate IT… okay, maybe a little something against filling out one too many hardware requisition forms back in the pre-cloud days. But if your cloud runs on your own infrastructure, you have deployed infrastructure ahead of customer demand and are paying for the privilege. The primary value in the cloud is the ability to leverage on-demand capacity of an external provider to align your infrastructure and customer demand. By running your own cloud (a.k.a. Virtualization 2.0), you are betting that your IT department can manage efficiencies comparable to public cloud providers.
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This post was a shameless attempt to make use of my 7 day OmniGraffle trial. OmniGraffle: where have you been all my life?
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Joe Kinsella is a high-tech VPE and startup junkie in the Boston area.
“The primary value in the cloud is the ability to leverage on-demand capacity of an external provider to align your infrastructure and customer demand.”
I would fundamentally disagree. There is a huge movement underway toward repatriating the cloud away from services like AWS. Corporate IT folks who “get it” are asking for AWS-like services to be deployed in-house. Benefits of this include better performance, better protection of corporate IP, more efficient utilization (purpose driven image sizes) and better ROI.
I definitely understand the value of corporate IT running their own cloud. I also realize it will continue to be good business for several years to come. But in order to believe it is a long term trend, you’d have to believe in corporate IT’s inability to maintain talent & efficiencies after the investment stage of this industry shift is over (and the investment stage of corporate IT clouds will eventually come to an end; e.g. client-server, web, virtualization).
Operating a scaled out cloud with high efficiency requires a focus, strategic commitment and funding that is difficult to execute in corporate IT.