You know the story. CIO buys into Cloud Computing model and the company saves millions. You are carried off on the shoulders of the CFO and forever enshrined in the CIO Hall of Fame. That’s your story right? Dropping the sarcasm for a minute I can guarantee you one thing – that is actually someone’s story. There are real life success stories using the Cloud to increase flexibility, capacity and manage cost. The CIOs and IT VPs leading the charge in the Cloud Computing space are in a position to fundamentally alter the traditional IT approach to value proposition. The interesting aspect of all this is every one of us will end up adopting the fundamental concepts of Cloud Computing regardless of industry or location. How many of you remember the intellectual hallway battles of Token Ring vs. Ethernet or Mainframe vs. Client/Server? Both of the winners were inevitable because they offered opportunities to implement and manage solutions with an emphasis on flexibility, capacity and cost. Cloud Computing concepts are seeping into the fabric of IT for the same reasons. AWS continues to offer Services, APIs and SDKs that make their platform increasingly seamless and straightforward for application development and infrastructure teams to adopt. Microsoft has recently made significant inroads in deploying service bus and Azure functionality as parts of Windows Server such that migration between on premise and off premise (Hybrid Cloud Computing) is achievable with minimal disruption. Cloud Computing features and concepts are becoming part of what we do and there is no decision to be made – only a course to set.
Now we get to the root of this post. I appreciate we all of have different levels of technical competency and interest. Most Chief Information Officers, even the most technically inclined, have responsibilities that prevent them taking on the mantel of Cloud Architect. I am not suggesting you fight that. Instead I am suggesting you acknowledge the real impact of Cloud Computing on your obligations – the people and how they are organized. Most of the press we read slants Cloud Computing as nothing more than a service bought and used off premise. The Cloud Computing challenges you really face are how will you turn your internal infrastructure into a Cloud, how will you blend your internal Cloud and external Cloud together seamlessly creating a Hybrid Cloud, how will you expand and contract the Cloud to manage costs, how will you take traditional custom application services and share them as application infrastructure, how will you take traditional infrastructure services and share them as applications and how will you organize, train and lead your people through this evolution?
In my next post I will explore these challenges in more detail and discuss real life organizational, management and leadership skills to transform your organization into one that can leverage and optimize the emergence of Cloud Computing as an inevitable approach for the management of infrastructure and application services in the enterprise.
