Cloud was tipped to be the one stop shop answer to all of your messy IT issues, your labyrinth of a data centre with god-knows-what in it, and your seamless upgrade to the latest technology.
But I don't think I'm in the minority when I say that cloud is now looking like a thornier solution than before. Let's look at how it stacks up in reality:
SUPPLIERS
Instead of liaising with various different hardware, software and service providers, you now liaise with Infrastructure hosting providers, application providers and then app as a service providers, and service providers on all or some of the contracts. Depending on how you consume the cloud services, you could end up making your IT layout much more difficult to navigate than before.
APPLICATIONS
So there are now various ways to "consume" an application which complicates the matter unless you consume them all in the same way. You might purchase applications as a service (I.e. Office365) in one part of the business, another might be web based login, then some other sit on infrastructure hosted services yet you still manage the applications and licensing, and some need to sit on your traditional on site hardware due to manufacturer specifications. Previously they were mainly all in house. Now they are everywhere.
BUSINESS DEPARTMENTS
Line of business departments now think nothing of purchasing cloud services, for instance, purchasing marketing apps as a service or HR employee intranets as a service. It's unlikely the IT department's workload will decrease, but the business as a whole will cumulatively spend more time managing IT resources.
ADMINISTRATION
People often use the analogy that Cloud services are like utility bills from the gas and water companies - you pay as you go and turn it on and off. This is supposed to make us feel that cloud services are an easy solution. And they are, however I've spent most of my free time today ringing up various energy providers, cable TV providers and utilities companies to change addresses and close accounts and it has been hellish. I've used certain passwords for some logins and a different email address for another, and not had the customer reference number to hand and completely forgotten my account number. Imagine on the scale of a company with hundreds if not thousands of employees and various contacts within that organisation managing cloud resources. Who is collating all of the service information? What is Joe Bloggs leaves the company? What if you've lost your account number and need urgent help?
Without a formal governance and management structure, these contracts can quickly get out of hand and become like those servers lurking at the back of the data centre that no one dares turn off for fear of what is sitting on them.
Now, I don't want to sound like I'm downing the whole idea of cloud. I think it's the future, I advocate it daily and help people incorporate it into their organisations.
What I am saying is that many companies are jumping frivolously into the cloud service consumption space because for two or three services, it doesn't matter if the process is a little complicated. But s the industry moves further in the direction of service on demand and everything as a service, those few contracts will snowball.
In the same way you need to rationalise your infrastructure to move to flexible computing, you also need to constantly rationalise and standardise your 'cloud estate'.
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