Cloud

Daniel333

Take it more seriously. Please guys.

I just had the unhappy experience of seeing a few people laid off today, so maybe this is written in an emotional state. I don’t take it well.

I have to say I feel uneasy about the chip on the shoulder of IT people right now when it comes to the cloud. In their world it’s often a buzz word. Some sort of marketing scam. But to C-level decision makers who will never ask your point of view, it’s an option.

This smug feels like those people buying houses with 10% down on adjustable loans just a few years ago.

I believe this chip is only happening because of this second tech-boom we’re in. Sure in many areas we’re looking at less than 2% unemployment in IT. But don’t kid yourself. This is a bubble.

The cloud isn’t a joke, it’s a challenge to you to adapt.

In my previous life we moved into small companies and worked on dismantling their IT departments. Turning 5-10 man teams to 0 man teams using Cloud and outsourced technology. People who at some point where every bit as smug but didn’t realize they were not satisfying their C-level staff’s expectation.

Exchange, IM, Sharepoint, backup, desktop apps and voip all outsourced and in the cloud. Support moved to India and Florida. Standard image laptops using hosted XenApp servers along with App-V. Complicated networks were replaced with boiler plate switches and Cisco ASAs which were all managed overseas and monitored by Cisco.

Fact of the matter? It worked better than what we walked in and saw. Sure, blame your manager that you don’t have the budget for XYZ, and it’s not your fault etc etc. Won’t matter when these sorts of companies come in at 80% of your cost with better SLAs.

If you have had a chance to work with things like azure, amazon, vCloud Director and Intermedia services you would see how impressive it’s really gotten. You’ll also see how heavy they are marketing how secure you’re your data will be straight to the C-level decision makers.

Installing fear of data loss to management, and hiding behind PCI compliance is not a strategy for a career. Automation efforts for even those sorts of things are getting better.

Be willing to start making the career changes now.

So, “the cloud” isn’t the evil bad guy that will steal your jobs. I firmly believe it’s a strategy that will change your jobs, and it will pick up the most steam just as the IT tech boom begins to reflect the rest of the economy.

ptilsen

I take it seriously, but it's hard to take it to the level media treats it. X as a service is a legitimate business and service model, and in many cases is really the only reasonable way to do things -- especially in the smaller shops. But cloud this, cloud that, the end of desktops, the end of sysadmins, everything will be on tablets, served from the cloud and supported by India, is just a little much to take seriously. I've been involved in a few "cloud" implementations, and I actually pushed my organization (a small MSP serving SMBs) into offering more SAAS and less software resale.

Sometimes it's great. We might spend a little bit less time implementing (and as such billing less), but we get a margin on a service provided by someone else (read: something for basically nothing) and we get to focus on the things that should requite an IT professionals direct attention.

In other cases, the cloud is very much like the cake: a lie. Sure, you can put the services on those servers in the cloud. First let's upgrade your Internet. Oh, you need all 800GB of data available and backed up? Oh, you need high-speed access to large files shared within departments and teams? You want to keep all emails, indefinitely, backed up and accessible from at least one computer?

The questions above really happened to a client after the expectations were not communicated well. A project that turned into moving server services to the cloud went from $50K implementation with monthly of $2,000 to $100K and $4,000/month. Instead of everything in the cloud, they have a local file server. If the Internet goes down, pretty much everything else does. For $100K and $4,000 month, we could have gotten them an ESX cluster with replicated SAN storage, offsite backups, redundant Internet, and a better infrastructure.

There's a lot more detail to that, but the point is that the X as a service isn't ready to replace all infrastructure, and in my opinion it's a ways away. That's coming from an MSP systems engineer -- in SMB world you have to do as much in the cloud/SAAS as you can if you want a system that's stable and affordable. In bigger organizations, you can provide a lot of those services in-house with similar up-time to a SAAS provider at lower cost. With a few exceptions, the technology in use at a SAAS provider is not different than that within a large organization. Once the organization is large enough, the scale is not different and the economy of scale provided by the SAAS is no longer there. Again, there are exceptions to this, but I don't see a company such as, say, a fortune 100 bank outsourcing its entire infrastructure. It's cheaper to provide most of the services and security in-house at that scale.

I do think we need to take this topic seriously, both as a direction of the industry and for those working in smaller shops, a serious potential job threat (and opportunity, simultaneously). But, as I've said, the cloud is not going to change the game for everyone, everywhere. I feel that it's doing what it should: bringing efficiency and reasonably cost where they're sorely lacking by removing the need for underutilized infrastructure and personnel.