What you need to know before moving to the cloud If you are located in the land Down Under and searching for public cloud hosting, then it might seem that the options available to you are pretty good. Amazon and Microsoft play in the market and the prices they offer are reasonably competitive. There are also a number of smaller cloud operators doing quite well for themselves …
Just this morning I got a call telling me that one of my clients is going for Office 365 and retiring its existing IT department. The heavy paychecks got caught by the Microsoft sirens and are steaming ahead to the magical land of IT will cost us nothing.
Yeah, sure.
Well I guess it's the price to pay to demonstrate to all those supposedly intelligent people what IT actually means and what the Cloud can actually give. Maybe when a few hundred companies have gone out of business due to cloud mishaps the industry will take a step back and start thinking about just how much a beancounters' opinion should matter in strategic decisions.
But first there must be blood.
Indeed. One client got upset when they hit a problem and they had to deal with the cloud providers help desk. They came to realise that when IT was local they could always go and shot at someone and once the problem was fixed they knew it had been fixed.
Mind you several places I've been working have simply re-labelled their existing data centres as "the cloud"!
Like the fact that outsourcing was marketing spin for selling all your IT staff to the lowest bidder with savings on paper, until companies realized the savings where not really there, and the got a much worse service. The same is happening with "The Cloud". Some IT departments have been clever, am managed to use the term "Private Cloud" to counteract this.
Give it a few years and the latest initiate to save money with be locally hosting all the stuff in "The Cloud" increasing value for money (Like insourcing is becoming). The Cloud should only really be used for stuff that needs to be internet facing, and have flexibility to change in size often.
Those of us who know what a physical server/network is will be in demand.
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