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When It Comes to the Cloud, Users Won’t Wait for IT

The saying “Give the customers what they want” has an equally important corollary: “If you don’t, customers will find another way to get it.” When it comes to public clouds, heed the corollary.

A new study, Delivering on High Cloud Expectations conducted by Forrester Consulting for business service management specialist BMC Software, won’t be released until April 26, but the company released a preview of some key findings this week that should be of interest to IT and business users (and managers) alike.

The study looks at the growing demand for public cloud services. That’s what the customer wants. It IT doesn’t give its users what they want, CIOs “are rightly concerned that business teams are willing to circumvent IT in order to acquire cloud services on their own.”

Business users see the cloud as a speedy and low-cost way of getting the solutions they need, which is putting pressure on IT everywhere. Although “IT teams work to meet the needs of the business, the demand for more speed and agility is creating an environment in which business teams are looking outside the organization to provision services in public clouds.” The bottom line: “IT departments must expand plans to incorporate public cloud services into their overall cloud strategies.”

Some key findings from the report show a conundrum for IT. For example, IT is battling complexity, which isn’t going to change any time soon. The survey found that “39 percent of respondents reported having five or more virtual server pools, and 43 percent report three or more hypervisor technologies.” The study found that IT’s top priority over the next year is cost reduction (the “doing more with less” principle), and “complexity reduction” is the leading strategy for getting there.

Business users, on the other hand, see cloud computing as a way to be independent of IT, according to 72 percent of the CIOs in the survey. The problem: when users go around IT, the complexity (and headaches) for IT simply increase. Unfortunately, users are already well on their way to this behavior. “Approximately 58 percent of respondents are running mission-critical workloads in the unmanaged public cloud regardless of policy, while only 36 percent have policies allowing this.” The survey found that 79 percent of respondents

“plan to support running mission-critical workloads on unmanaged public cloud services in the next two years.”

They’d better hurry if they don’t want to lose all control. Don’t get me wrong -- IT wants to help, but it’ll be tough when you read that “71 percent of respondents thought that IT operations should be responsible for ensuring public cloud services meet their firm’s requirements for performance, security, and availability,” but “61 percent of the survey respondents agreed that it will be difficult to provide the same level of management across public and private cloud services.”

The study was based on a sample of “327 enterprise infrastructure executives and architects across the United States, Europe and Asia-Pacific.”

-- James E. Powell
Editorial Director, ESJ

Posted by Jim Powell on 03/23/2012 at 12:11 PM


Comments

Tue, Apr 3, 2012 James NC

Re John's comment: All quite true, but in each of the firms I've worked at, truth & common sense just don't seem to matter much when it comes to a realistic assessment of IT capabilities. Sr Mgnt is generally technically clueless and will almost always align themselves with the desires of the Line of Business Managers rather than IT Mgnt - regardless of whether it is a sound business move or not. It's politically so much easier. IT is going to get shafted one way or another.

Tue, Apr 3, 2012 John Canberra Australia

This is not an IT issue – it is a business issue and it is time businesses managed this. I am a consumer of IT resources and am quite frustrated by the delays I am experiencing so I can see where the business user is coming from, however having an IT background I can also see the IT perspective. #### Business users of office space rarely go out and rent their own premises – it wouldn’t be sensible and given it would probably be seen as inefficient use of resources (leading to increased travel time, inefficient phone service, leases on properties that subsequently remain unoccupied, etc) then it is unlikely to be permitted. IT has to be viewed in its entirety and the inefficiencies of formulating short-term solutions that contain long-term costs and other penalties have to be recognised by the business. IT generally haven’t got the “power” or “persuasiveness” to shape the business, so the managers of the business have to do it, and if IT are unable to service the business users in an adequate timeframe then it is time that either the business users were educated as to the constraints under which they must operate or IT were funded on the basis that these needs must be serviced more quickly. #### Remember – it is not IT that will suffer in the long term (IT staff will generally find other jobs). The absence of an adequate IT capability is a technical debt that the business will pay (with significant penalty costs) either through increased cost in the out-years or by going out of business. It is time that the managers woke up to this.

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