Cloud Adoption Is Still Not A Done Deal
I have some thoughts on this new piece from 451 Research about IT provisioning. The report is all about how organisations that are slow to deliver IT resources will struggle to achieve their other goals. As business becomes more and more reliant on IT, the performance of IT becomes a key controlling factor for the overall performance of the entire business.
This connection between business and IT is fast becoming a truism; very few businesses could exist without IT, and most activities are now IT-enabled to some extent. If you’re selling something, you’ll have a website. People need to be able to access that website, and you need to make regular changes as you roll out new products, run sales promotions, or whatever. All of that requires IT support.
Where things get interesting is in the diagnosis of why some organisations succeed and others do not:
Just as internal IT culture and practices have an impact on provisioning time, they can also severely impact acceptance of technologies. Although the promise of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging among IT managers who took early steps toward machine-enabled infrastructure control, much work remains in convincing organizations of the technologies' benefits. In fact, the more manual the processes are for IT infrastructure management, the less likely that IT managers believe that machine learning and AI capabilities in vendor products will simplify IT management. Conversely, most managers in highly automated environments are convinced that these technologies will improve IT management.
If the IT team is still putting hands on keyboards for routine activities, that’s a symptom of some deeper rot.
It may appear easy to regard perpetual efforts of organizations to modernize their on-premises IT environments as temporary measures to extract any remaining value from company-owned datacenters before complete public cloud migration occurs. However, the rate of IT evolution via automation technologies is accelerating at a pace that allows organizations to ultimately transform their on-premises IT into cloudlike models that operate relatively seamlessly through hybrid cloud deployments.
The benefits of private cloud are something I have been writing about for a long time:
The reason this type of organisation might want to look at private cloud is that there’s a good chance that a substantial proportion of that legacy infrastructure is under- or even entirely un-used. Some studies I’ve seen even show average utilisation below 10%! This is where they get their elasticity: between the measured service and the resource pooling, they get a much better handle on what that infrastructure is currently used for. Over time, private cloud users can then bring their average utilisation way up, while also increasing customer satisfaction.
The bottom line is, if you already own infrastructure, and if you have relatively stable and predictable workloads, your best bet is to figure out ways to use what you already have more efficiently. If you just blindly jump into the public cloud, without addressing those cultural challenges, all you will end up with is a massive bill from your public cloud provider.
Large organisations have turning circles that battleships would be embarrassed by, and their radius is largely determined by culture, not by technology. Figuring out new ways to use internal resources more efficiently (private cloud), perhaps in combination with new types of infrastructure (public cloud), will get you where you need to be.
That cultural shift is the do-or-die, though. The agility of a 21st century business is determined largely by the agility of its IT support. Whatever sorts of resources the IT department is managing, they need to be doing so in a way which delivers the kinds of speed and agility that the business requires. If internal IT becomes a bottleneck, that’s when it gets bypassed in favour of that old bugbear of shadow IT.
IT is becoming more and more of a differentiator between companies, and it is also a signifier of which companies will make it in the long term – and which will not. It may already be too late to change the culture at organisations still mired in hands-on, artisanal provisioning of IT resources, but it is certain that completing that transition should be a priority.
