Cloud Computing has already changed the way many organisations provide technology services. CIOs and other business leaders are looking beyond the hype to see what opportunities and challenges lie in the Cloud—and how this approach can be used to further the organisation’s strategy to achieve high performance.
The Cloud business model creates the potential for delivering lower-cost services, greater IT agility, more flexibility and better user experiences. But an uncontrolled approach to Cloud could cause some IT headaches. Indeed, many organisations are unaware that they face issues because staff have already started to use the Cloud approach for IT provisioning. By allowing an unmanaged, unstructured approach to Cloud Computing usage, a new phenomenon emerges - Cloud sprawl.
It is simple to create and provision Cloud services. Indeed, anyone with a modicum of technology knowledge can do it and they want to because it is faster, cheaper, easier, and more responsive than much of what they already have. But there’s the rub: Cloud environments start springing up where they shouldn’t, violating departmental borders, duplicating services, and operating outside the auspices of the IT shop. In other words, the simplicity of Cloud Computing can encourage sprawl and the inherent risks that come with an unmanaged IT environment.
Securing and enabling infrastructure inside enterprises is often a drawn out process. What’s more, traditional IT is up and running around the clock. Cloud services can be turned on and off on demand. So it’s not surprising that users are choosing the Cloud in response to the fact that internal IT can be too slow, too expensive, and too inefficient.
As a result, there is the potential for enterprise data to end up all over the place, without the strong control or even knowledge of the IT department. Unless IT shops can get a step ahead of this by providing ways for people to utilise Cloud Computing inside the constructs of their domain, they will end up with unmanaged environments.
This negates the efficiency gains that Cloud can bring. Worse, it can change how and where its data is stored. This ad-hoc approach to usage could cause a logistical nightmare for CIOs, especially as they seek to move to new Cloud providers themselves.
What to Do
The worst case response would be for IT shops to set up special management silos for Cloud services. You need and ought to be able to manage external and internal resources seamlessly as if they were inside your own four walls, applying the same rigour that is seen in other areas of IT provision.
The reality is that businesses crave computer capacity. If IT shops can’t provide the benefits available in the Cloud, people will seek to get the services through a back door. Before, in the ‘90s, it was very difficult to do this because you couldn’t buy or rent servers without raising capital requests. That’s not the case now.
IT departments can try to block it by, in effect, putting the genie back in the bottle. From a business perspective, however, it is very difficult to prevent people from taking advantage of something that’s cheaper, faster, and more efficient. The right approach is to try to co-opt services from the Cloud providers, to use them as the basis of IT services, to make the internal IT shop just as fast, just as nimble, and just as elastic as any of the Cloud providers.
While being rigid and inflexible is a mistake, so is doing things willy nilly without some sort of management control. There needs to be a meeting somewhere in the middle. The onus is on the CIO, who can begin by offering these services straight away. CIOs have to provide an ease of consumption that rivals or exceeds that of the Cloud providers. Right now, they are not in a position to do this.
It’s along the lines of the commoditisation of IT, where the workforce is savvier about IT and has different expectations on how to use it. Companies that bring in many contractors, for example, can provide them with virtual desktop applications that allow them to access company resources in a secured environment on an insecure device, such as a laptop.
The end goal is to adopt a more Cloud-like approach inside the data centre. CIOs shouldn’t resist, as there are valuable lessons to be learned from what the Cloud providers are doing. Yes, they may not have all enterprise capability, but they are doing things that are very interesting and certainly demonstrate the art of the possible.
It’s all about being flexible and nimble and responsive to your customers, characteristics that, in the long run, increase the value of IT. This is all part of the next generation data centre, where the challenge is to monitor and manage the technology infrastructure that enables business productivity improvements and business growth, while simultaneously focusing on reducing costs, improving operational efficiencies, ensuring security and enabling new capabilities.
Joe Tobolski, is director, Cloud Computing services, Accenture
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