Grasping For The Cloud
ME: To what degree do you think that IT has changed its role and has in fact matured from being the plumbers who kept the water running to becoming part of the line of business experience?
LYNN: The role of IT has become much, much more aligned with the business. That’s one of the main reasons organizations move to the cloud—they’re aware that IT resources are so precious that they don’t want them to focus on low-value manual work. They want to have time to work with business units and understand their requirements. The role of IT is being elevated. Their top initiatives are definitely business-related; they are not pure technology anymore.
ME: Do you think the executive level and financial levels of a typical company care about cloud strategies? Or do they allow the lower-tier groups to handle it?
LYNN: There are plenty of companies sticking their toe in the water, and the leadership may not get directly involved. But there are some cases where the executive side and the finance side are getting involved, because they are managing business processes in a different way. And on the financial side, they’re changing from capital to operating expense.
ME: To what degree is it a financial decision? Are they looking at cloud and saying “Well, it’s cheaper. Let’s do that”?
LYNN: Cost benefits are definitely a factor. BUT organizations go to the cloud for a lot of different reasons, and cost is not necessarily the top consideration. In fact, what we’re seeing now is the search for agility and the need for speed. Cost is always a factor, but they are also looking for ways to keep IT resources concentrated on high value work, instead of focusing on hardware/software/upgrades that take time away from the important projects.
The other driving factor is mobile strategies, and globalization strategies. That makes them look at the cloud as well. They need to get information more distributed, which means they need to get infrastructure changes in place to support that.
ME: In my mind (small as it is) it seems you touched on the mobile nature of business users today. To what degree do you accept (or even endorse) the existence of “shadow IT”—where end users bypass IT and go off the reservation to create their own applications in order to accomplish their goals?
LYNN: Companies need to be concerned with security and governance, for sure. We can see how shadow IT happens, but it’s not a recommended approach. If you can pull out a credit card and send information into the cloud, that information can leave with little or no corporate governance. Organizations need to have guidelines in place that have been vetted by the IT group, or information that everyone is happy to share publicly. So it’s important that lines of business and IT work together to choose wisely.
Can You Teach It?
ME: So do you see governance as primarily a policy issue? One that can’t necessarily be automated by some software tool?
LYNN: There are very good systems out there that they can take advantage of, but they also have to be careful with what is in the information they are sharing and how they choose to share that. IT can only do so much. Monitoring what went outside the wall is after the fact. It’s great to have the ability to go to the cloud, if you can do it within guidelines. But you must be sure that only information that is assured by policy AND technology goes out.
ME: Let’s change gears here. Explain to me the difference between the public cloud and a private cloud. They seem contradictory to me. A private cloud seems to be the opposite of “cloud.” It’s on premise and controlled from within. That sounds like regular old computing to me.
LYNN: There’s all sorts of definitions. Here’s an analogy: Think about a condo. The heating system is built for the whole complex. The management company provides heating for all the units, and it probably costs less for each unit than if they had to do it themselves. Each unit has its own thermostat, and it doesn’t affect your neighbors, but you’re not managing the overall temperature for the entire building. You don’t know how it’s managed overall, you just know what’s on your own thermostat.
ME: I revert once again to Gartner here. “Private cloud computing is a form of cloud computing that is used by only one organization, or that ensures that an organization is completely isolated from others.
“Public cloud computing is a style of computing where scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are provided as a service to external customers using Internet technologies. Public cloud is a shared service between many.”
To be honest, that doesn’t help much. I still think that private cloud sounds a whole lot like regular old computing. I need more school, I guess.
Of all the benefits of cloud computing, which one do you think is the “killer” … the one that pushes your customers over the edge to adoption?
LYNN: Every organization has its own. What’s interesting is that it is never the same. For some it’s that “capital versus operational expenditure” that allows them to get approval. Sometimes it’s a time-to-value issue—“I can get that up and running within 30 days versus six months or eight months.” They don’t need to go through capital expense procedures for hardware, get it all installed, buy the software, etc. The on-premises implementation can be very cumbersome and have many stops.
That’s part of it. But for others, it’s the IT shortage. They need to innovate, they want to do more things, they’ve gotten closer to the business needs, but they’ve only got so many people, and they’re not about to get more. So they can use cloud to free up staff and be able to innovate.
ME: What’s the dark side? What’s the biggest hurdle that companies need to overcome to adopt a cloud strategy?
LYNN: Today the decision is not about whether to adopt a cloud strategy. Rather, it’s a decision about what type of information to put into the cloud, which applications, what type of cloud… Who are the most trusted vendors? What level of service will they provide? The wide range of service providers put IT departments in the position of comparing apples to oranges. That can be daunting. That’s why I think the hybrid cloud can be the most ideal and the most realistic. Organizations can do the analysis upfront of their business requirements and clear the path toward the right cloud. Over time, we’ve seen many companies move toward a higher level of managed service.