I like the idea of “cloud computing”; in our own consultancy business we use shared services for most of our key business processes. But I don’t think the cloud will solve some of the problems people had hoped for.
Of course, I may be just over-cautious.
Having worked in IT for a number of years, I have to fight the temptation to resist the “next big thing” which promises to solve all our IT problems. To make matters worse, I used to work in the sharp end of Software Sales, so I have seen over-zealous marketing glossing over the practical challenges of implementing the latest solution.
But this time my concern is more fundamental; It is based on our core motivation for embracing the Cloud concept in the first place.
Outsourcing compute processing, even core data, brings risks - security risks, performance and capacity risks to name a few. The justification for cloud computing is that the benefits outweigh the risks.
The attraction of the cloud approach is that someone else looks after hardware provisioning, capacity planning, availability management etc. etc. leaving you to get on with running your business processes.
So what if you need more capacity? Just pay more - Simple! Or is it?
The fact is that no technology provider has unlimited resources, and if you choose a supplier which is not the “right size” for you, you could end up with excess costs or (worse) a provider that cannot provision to your needs.
So you still need to think about Capacity Management.
The Cloud enables you to outsource technology. But there is no such thing as outsourcing responsibility.
For some, the attraction of moving to the cloud is that they no longer need to manage hardware and software. Instead, they need to manage the “wetware”; the people who supply the cloud solution.
You might get rid of Availability and Capacity Management.
But instead you have to replace it with Supplier Management.
And, as many people will tell you, managing people can be far more complex and hazardous than managing technology.
