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'.
Wednesday 29 May 2013
Thursday 23 May 2013
Wednesday 22 May 2013
Everyone thinks they are dynamic and cloud ready
The more and more people I speak to, the more and more they say they are "very dynamic" and "much more strategic" than competitors.
Now, I am notoriously bad at maths, but obviously we can't all be dominant in our market place. Some organisations have to by simple arithmetic be the leaders in the field, and consequently some have to be at he bottom.
I usually find that the ones that think they are behind the curve are usually ahead of the pack. They have taken the time and risk to their own pride, to look critically at what they are doing well and what they aren't achieving. And they set out to change, and move ahead of all of the other loud, flamboyant players who are busy raising the roof on how darn brilliant there are.
In technology, it can be painful to admit that there is some way to go, but without critically assessing your business processes and IT environment, nothing is going to change and things will be done as they were always done.
Yet consumers expect far more from organisations and that drive to be dynamic is more important than ever. Look at the recent deal between Morrisons and Ocado for Online shopping service deployment - this wasn't a choice, this was a necessary move that Morrisons had to make to keep up with the market place.
While they are crafting a simple online grocery business and reinventing the wheel, who knows how the larger players who are fully entrenched in the online market will change their shopping experiences in the future? We might start seeing 3D shopping, or simulated shops. Who knows?
But imagine if they don't critically assess what they are doing today, and keep plodding away doing a decent job of the status quo? They will find themselves ten years behind the curve, struggling to deploy a me-too solution to a saturated market.
Leading me on to cloud. Cloud is the end point of the dynamic thermometer shall we say. True leveraging of cloud resources in a flexible, scalable environment is the epitome of a dynamic and innovative business.
However too many organisations believe they are cloud ready and are starting to dip their toe gingerly in some areas and without inhibition in other less mission critical areas. However this is just adding a layer of complex and difficult to manage resources across the organisation and creating headaches not only for IT but for the business users that procured these cloud services in the first place behind the backs of the sluggish IT teams.
Cloud ready is about being able to effectively categorise all business services across the organisation and apply SLAs spanning performance, uptime, resiliency, security etc depending on type, volume and importance of the application or data. Once this step is complete, businesses can then procure cloud services from a range of interoperable suppliers and flex and scale the services as required.
You can be cloud ready without having ever touched a cloud. It's abut critically assessing your environment and being honest with yourself about the changes needed to be made. But in the long run, this means you can grow to be in the leader category I mentioned before, you can be dynamic, and most importantly or at least until this current fad lasts; you can be cloud ready.
Now, I am notoriously bad at maths, but obviously we can't all be dominant in our market place. Some organisations have to by simple arithmetic be the leaders in the field, and consequently some have to be at he bottom.
I usually find that the ones that think they are behind the curve are usually ahead of the pack. They have taken the time and risk to their own pride, to look critically at what they are doing well and what they aren't achieving. And they set out to change, and move ahead of all of the other loud, flamboyant players who are busy raising the roof on how darn brilliant there are.
In technology, it can be painful to admit that there is some way to go, but without critically assessing your business processes and IT environment, nothing is going to change and things will be done as they were always done.
Yet consumers expect far more from organisations and that drive to be dynamic is more important than ever. Look at the recent deal between Morrisons and Ocado for Online shopping service deployment - this wasn't a choice, this was a necessary move that Morrisons had to make to keep up with the market place.
While they are crafting a simple online grocery business and reinventing the wheel, who knows how the larger players who are fully entrenched in the online market will change their shopping experiences in the future? We might start seeing 3D shopping, or simulated shops. Who knows?
But imagine if they don't critically assess what they are doing today, and keep plodding away doing a decent job of the status quo? They will find themselves ten years behind the curve, struggling to deploy a me-too solution to a saturated market.
Leading me on to cloud. Cloud is the end point of the dynamic thermometer shall we say. True leveraging of cloud resources in a flexible, scalable environment is the epitome of a dynamic and innovative business.
However too many organisations believe they are cloud ready and are starting to dip their toe gingerly in some areas and without inhibition in other less mission critical areas. However this is just adding a layer of complex and difficult to manage resources across the organisation and creating headaches not only for IT but for the business users that procured these cloud services in the first place behind the backs of the sluggish IT teams.
Cloud ready is about being able to effectively categorise all business services across the organisation and apply SLAs spanning performance, uptime, resiliency, security etc depending on type, volume and importance of the application or data. Once this step is complete, businesses can then procure cloud services from a range of interoperable suppliers and flex and scale the services as required.
You can be cloud ready without having ever touched a cloud. It's abut critically assessing your environment and being honest with yourself about the changes needed to be made. But in the long run, this means you can grow to be in the leader category I mentioned before, you can be dynamic, and most importantly or at least until this current fad lasts; you can be cloud ready.
Tuesday 21 May 2013
For The First Time
You have to start somewhere, and here I start today, or more accurately - tonight.
There are always changes happening in the enterprise technology space but currently they are unfolding with such rapidity that I wanted to capture some of these intriguing shifts in the market and collate in one place, with particular geographical focus on the UK technology industry specifically.
There are always changes happening in the enterprise technology space but currently they are unfolding with such rapidity that I wanted to capture some of these intriguing shifts in the market and collate in one place, with particular geographical focus on the UK technology industry specifically.
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