CIOs Have Stopped Fighting the Cloud

Zarathustra[H]

Zarathustra[H]

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Infoworld has an article up suggesting that CIO's who once were skeptical of migrating their IT infrastructure to "the Cloud" have either given up fighting, changed their minds or have been fired, as CEO's and boards have pressed for the additional cost savings that can be achieved my migrating to external cloud providers. In the UK more than 9 in 10 CIO's now have plans to move their infrastructure to external cloud providers in the next 5 years, and somehow Infoworld thinks this is "good news".

Personally, I feel like moving your organizations key data and IT infrastructure to an external system you don't fully control and thus can't (or at least shouldn't) trust is a blunder of epic proportions, regardless of how much money can be saved. "The Cloud" is arguably one of the worst ideas in tech of the last decade, and it is sad to see so many organizations overly eager to embrace it. After all, there is no "cloud". It's just someone else's computer. Just like how many organizations who outsourced their IT and support to low cost countries have had a change of heart and are bringing it back home due to unexpected complications and costs, I expect the same will happen when it comes to "the cloud" in the not too distant future.

I guess some people just have to learn the hard way.

The stated driver for the shift was mostly cost savings, cited by 61 percent. A close second was scalability, at 60 percent. Solving that pesky business agility problem came in at 51 percent. A bit less than half (49 percent) said that outplacing existing infrastructure (such as storage and compute) was the primary driver for migrating to the cloud. Indeed, more than half of CIOs said the complexity of their existing IT infrastructure was causing too much latency.
 
Yes, you might save a few bucks for now, but once they get your hooks into you, and your org becomes fully dependent, it will all reach critical mass, then they can justify whatever prices they want to charge... until a mass outage strikes then the pendulum will swing the other way.
 
I agree with the editorial with one exception, that being offsite backup for home servers. I have a lot of data, it's stored on a reasonably secure and specced machine (proper ZFS config, proper power backup etc) but an automatic off-site backup to an encrypted pool is convenient and sensible to me. But to have a cloud as the first stop? No way for my own data, and a business is insane to do it.

What is interesting to me is Office 365. My work is transitioning to it, and it looks like the programs (IM, collaboration, word etc) will default to cloud storage and make local storage inconvenient. Interestingly, our IT department has not issued a single policy update for using those services. Source code and proprietary documents unencrypted up in that Microsoft cloud? No problem, apparently.
 
There is no such thing as the cloud, it's just someone else' PC

Seriously tho, as an MSP, I can see both sides of this. On one hand we save some money for smaller companies and a ton of money for larger companies, and we have way more techs here to bounce odd tickets off of then your average IT department

On the flip side, if you have an issue you have to go into a longer queue then as if you had your own IT staff, and if you need on site help you're at the mercy of the current schedule of our techs. Much easier for a guy to walk up two flights of stairs rather then wait 2 hours for a tech to be available and then a 20 minute drive. Combine that with how frequent internet issues happen that's a lot of wasted production time to spend waiting on your services because your internet connection has failed. At least with local hardware you have your internal resources working still.

Then again, the companies that are serious about cloud all have 2-3 redundant internet connections but still, at some point the practical costs balance out pretty close no matter which way you go when you look at big picture

Our best customers are actually hybrid, we do could services for them but they have local hardware and staff as well. If I was running a company I would do something like that. Keep one tier 1 and one tier 3 guy on site, keep all my hardware, but use a BUDR solution like we offer where if the physical hardware goes all of our servers could be run remotely until local hardware is back up.
 
swetmore said:
Yes, you might save a few bucks for now, but once they get your hooks into you, and your org becomes fully dependent, it will all reach critical mass, then they can justify whatever prices they want to charge... until a mass outage strikes then the pendulum will swing the other way.
Click to expand...

DEPENDS.

I've moved 3 companies from local data centers to AWS and they are tickled pink. They don't have to manage servers, they don't have to manage hardware, networking is a breeze, access is a breeze, and uptime is sitting on the 5 9's that every CIO drools to have.

You pay a bit more to have someone else handle all the underlying resources but as long as you have the dreaded B-WORD (BACKUPS) to some other company (AWS->Azure/Google) you can sell these plans all day long to management.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Infoworld has an article up suggesting that CIO's who once were skeptical of migrating their IT infrastructure to "the Cloud" have either given up fighting, changed their minds or have been fired, as CEO's and boards have pressed for the additional cost savings that can be achieved my migrating to external cloud providers. In the UK more than 9 in 10 CIO's now have plans to move their infrastructure to external cloud providers in the next 5 years, and somehow Infoworld thinks this is "good news".

Personally, I feel like moving your organizations key data and IT infrastructure to an external system you don't fully control and thus can't (or at least shouldn't) trust is a blunder of epic proportions, regardless of how much money can be saved. "The Cloud" is arguably one of the worst ideas in tech of the last decade, and it is sad to see so many organizations overly eager to embrace it. After all, there is no "cloud". It's just someone else's computer. Just like how many organizations who outsourced their IT and support to low cost countries have had a change of heart and are bringing it back home due to unexpected complications and costs, I expect the same will happen when it comes to "the cloud" in the not too distant future.

I guess some people just have to learn the hard way.

The stated driver for the shift was mostly cost savings, cited by 61 percent. A close second was scalability, at 60 percent. Solving that pesky business agility problem came in at 51 percent. A bit less than half (49 percent) said that outplacing existing infrastructure (such as storage and compute) was the primary driver for migrating to the cloud. Indeed, more than half of CIOs said the complexity of their existing IT infrastructure was causing too much latency.
Click to expand...


Well, if you do go to a cloud service provider, I advice you to seriously audit their coop plan.
 
Bigdady92 said:
DEPENDS.

I've moved 3 companies from local data centers to AWS and they are tickled pink. They don't have to manage servers, they don't have to manage hardware, networking is a breeze, access is a breeze, and uptime is sitting on the 5 9's that every CIO drools to have.

You pay a bit more to have someone else handle all the underlying resources but as long as you have the dreaded B-WORD (BACKUPS) to some other company (AWS->Azure/Google) you can sell these plans all day long to management.
Click to expand...
Not in my business area :sneaky:

It's not that the military isn't trying to leverage cloud technologies, it's just that they can't apply them to all of the environment models.
 
lcpiper said:
Well, if you do go to a cloud service provider, I advice you to seriously audit their coop plan.
Click to expand...

Working in IT security Auditing, once something goes into AWS all you can get for answers is that they've done a SOC2 and they're fine, dont worry about it, and no you can't ask any more questions.
 
Cloud is very stupid stupid, but technical people aren't making these decisions any more. It's the people paying the bills, because they have no trust in their technical people, sometimes justifiably. The IT industry is it's own worst enemy and sales people are now eating them for breakfast.
 
Catboxer said:
Working in IT security Auditing, once something goes into AWS all you can get for answers is that they've done a SOC2 and they're fine, dont worry about it, and no you can't ask any more questions.
Click to expand...

I don't have any of your experience in that area as my customer is always DOD so everything is in-house. And I prefer it that way even though it has it's own set of downsides.
 
The same people who messed up their networks by cutting IT staff and not upgrade equipment/software, now think everything will be better by moving to the cheapest cloud solution they can find. This will not end well.

Just wait for the 1st outage that lasts more than a few hours, and their company business comes to a complete halt.
 
if you're going full could you need to have triple redundancy on your internet connection, period. Some jack ass takes out a pole guess what, cable fiber and DSL all ride on that same pole lol, you'll have to have a wireless option as well. Unless downtime isn't expensive but in that case why did you go cloud in the first place?
 
lollerwaffle said:
I agree with the editorial with one exception, that being offsite backup for home servers. I have a lot of data, it's stored on a reasonably secure and specced machine (proper ZFS config, proper power backup etc) but an automatic off-site backup to an encrypted pool is convenient and sensible to me. But to have a cloud as the first stop? No way for my own data, and a business is insane to do it.

What is interesting to me is Office 365. My work is transitioning to it, and it looks like the programs (IM, collaboration, word etc) will default to cloud storage and make local storage inconvenient. Interestingly, our IT department has not issued a single policy update for using those services. Source code and proprietary documents unencrypted up in that Microsoft cloud? No problem, apparently.
Click to expand...


I have noticed the same thing, and also was surprised at the apparent lack of concern letting most of the important documentation ending up being stored on Microsoft's onedrive unencrypted. Seems shortsighted.
 
Doing data management for multi billion dollar companies I fear the cloud and SaS, which they claim saves money so it puts me on chopping block until they realize SaS cost a fortune if you have a dynamically changing environment.
Or you get a provider like Aconnex that after a year of looking cheap sends massive bills for any new projects or work setup
Others like Miles you get absolutely zero access to servers, so submit a support ticket and wait... Potentially costing hundreds of thousands in down time with no reimbursement

Small companies it makes sense if you're paying 20k/yr for everything rather than 70k on servers and then licensing
 
There are pluses and minuses for both cases. For smaller-medium shops, you get access to a much more robust/secure infrastructure than you could ever afford, from a company that hires more/skilled workers than you could afford to maintain it.

But it's also stupid to just throw cloud around, like that means the same thing to everyone.

Not gonna go into paragraphs to debate each point, but it's just as stupid to say 'cloud bad, only teh stoopid would do that' as it is to say the opposite.



*^ You're missing an 'a' in SaaS
 
davethehedgehog said:
Cloud is very stupid stupid, but technical people aren't making these decisions any more. It's the people paying the bills, because they have no trust in their technical people, sometimes justifiably. The IT industry is it's own worst enemy and sales people are now eating them for breakfast.
Click to expand...

Don't worry. When the cloud goes down, they will still blame IT, assuming they have and IT employees left :p
 
Americans hate foreign labor in their country? H1B getting a lot of hate? That's ok we'll just move to the cloud, which sits outside of your country. That's the only reason I can see for doing this, besides lowered costs cause cheap foreign labor.

I predict that companies will experience constant downtime for their machines. Either that or extremely low performance.
 
DukenukemX said:
Americans hate foreign labor in their country? H1B getting a lot of hate? That's ok we'll just move to the cloud, which sits outside of your country. That's the only reason I can see for doing this, besides lowered costs cause cheap foreign labor.

I predict that companies will experience constant downtime for their machines. Either that or extremely low performance.
Click to expand...


Perfect example of how ambiguous 'cloud' is and that most people don't actually understand it.
 
For organizations that don't have a lot of data changes nor need large bandwidth to the servers, cloud might make sense. For those that generate a lot of fresh data or need huge bandwidth to the servers, cloud might be a sucker's play. Sure, you might save money on your server farm, but the cost of an ISP connection fast enough to handle your data needs + the cost of a backup ISP connection may well wind up costing more then the costs of an in house server setup.

Part of the problem is corporate accounting is weird. Things most of us would consider assets like servers and such wind up being tax liabilities while monthly bills for cloud services + IT contractors often equate to tax advantages.
 
I suspect we will continue to see a ramp up, as the gov and mil spec certified compliant "cloud" services have come online. Government and military have a lot of money to through around, and it can make sense in some scenarios.
 
The pendulum swings, we consultants make money. In another couple of years I'm going to start selling private infrastructure again once I've got most of my customer base in the cloud.

Hell, hurricane Sandy knocked out VOIP phones for customers of mine in San Francisco. It took out one of our providers data center in New York.
 
zerogg said:
Plus pricing works alot differently for Gov and Mil too.
Click to expand...


No shit, the Army has a service maintenance agreement running with CISCO that costs approximately 1 Billion a year and for that, CISCO doesn't even track licenses lol, you give them 1 bil a year and they just open the vault and invite you in.
 
Yeah, same thing with VMware too, heard it was in the neighborhood of a billion too. Pretty impressive, considering how much you have to consider licensing concerns in the private space.
 
Remember that time AWS or DNS servers went down and crippled entire parts of the country?

Nope me either.

Here are the 9 out of 10 CIO's to back that up:

1dbf60fc109a8c75bb61f1e3d007146e.jpg
 
We're looking into the cloud for various things at the bank. We'll never host our core ops in the cloud but there is a lot of computational work that we do on a cyclic basis were hardware sits most of the time and that's where we're looking to offload to the cloud.

Even if the cloud doesn't work for an organization across the board being able to spin up and down capacity with out a capital outlay can be EXTREMELY cost effective.
 
Yeah, I have been at an organization where their finance dept had a huge workload like that for end of year that took something like 10 or 15 dual proc servers for three weeks, and would otherwise idle. Similar thing for quarterly too. Makes alot of sense in those scenarios.
 
westrock2000 said:
Remember that time AWS or DNS servers went down and crippled entire parts of the country?

Nope me either.

Here are the 9 out of 10 CIO's to back that up:

1dbf60fc109a8c75bb61f1e3d007146e.jpg
Click to expand...

Happened to Azure as well. We are migrating and our concern isn't even the up/down time. It's the damn cost. AWS and Azure are ludicrously expensive, we can do it considerably cheaper on prem.

Need a price war to break out if they want more migrations.
 
Verge said:
Happened to Azure as well. We are migrating and our concern isn't even the up/down time. It's the damn cost. AWS and Azure are ludicrously expensive, we can do it considerably cheaper on prem.

Need a price war to break out if they want more migrations.
Click to expand...

If it's not cost effective then there's no point. The problem with something like cloud computing is it, like many IT innovations, becomes a magic elixir for everything and of course IT companies marketing the cloud heavily doesn't help. But there are clear and obvious benefits for many but like anything else, it depends.
 
heatlesssun said:
If it's not cost effective then there's no point. The problem with something like cloud computing is it, like many IT innovations, becomes a magic elixir for everything and of course IT companies marketing the cloud heavily doesn't help. But there are clear and obvious benefits for many but like anything else, it depends.
Click to expand...

It's not very cost effective for us... but CIO says go cloud, costs be damn.

You can go see the Azure pricing.. shit some of it is crazy.
 
I am waiting for our company president to ask about the cloud. We just finally got a fast enough internet connection that three outside offices can log into our local server and not have to wait two or three minutes for a print job to spool. Also about once a week we get an email that the outer office VOIP phones are out and all their calls are being routed to someone's cellphone at the main office lol.

If you are located out in the middle of nowhere with sketchy internet service even with dedicated lines, then "the cloud" will not be faster or better. Maybe some day when they actually build some infrastructure for rural high speed internet it might apply to us.

My house is only five miles from town and the best internet I can get is 1.5M down ATT DSL. In town you are doing good to get 30M down.
 
Hmm, at work we have such shitty internet that youtube videos buffer and using the VPN results in you "downloading" 500kb excel files over a few minutes.

We have about 2gb of Computer Aided Engineering CAE data per job with about 10tb of job history that gets referenced on the regular. If we had to use Cloud storage it would basically stop our company dead.
 
Verge said:
Happened to Azure as well. We are migrating and our concern isn't even the up/down time. It's the damn cost. AWS and Azure are ludicrously expensive, we can do it considerably cheaper on prem.

Need a price war to break out if they want more migrations.
Click to expand...

I looked at AWS about a year and a half ago, at least then you can buy all your own physical equipment for the cost of under a year's worth of AWS subscription, was surprised how expensive it really is.
 
It's strange, the company I work at is gung ho against cloud. All cloud sites are blocked (even remote login apps). My employer is extremely vigilant about trade secrets getting out (we even firewall off parts of our own company operating in certain countries).

I guess that's not a concern for many companies.
 
Verge said:
It's not very cost effective for us... but CIO says go cloud, costs be damn.

You can go see the Azure pricing.. shit some of it is crazy.
Click to expand...

Completely NOT cost effective for us.
We are a Microsoft developer, and they give us enough production licenses to run the business.
Saves us 10's of thousands in software costs, and is why we are almost completely a Microsoft shop. :p


Besides, we are constantly copying 60GB VM's (demos) across the network, something that is slow enough over a switched local GB connection. Even a 1GB internet connection would be too slow since it's shared.

Besides, the 60TB of data I support would be expensive to host, and trying to back it up to the Cloud would take over a week with a 1Gb connection :eek:
 
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The on premise dreams of CIOs died long ago due to cost etc. And its obvious on something like Intels financials for a real long time where some of the cloud growth is countered by lower traditional enterprise sales. There is private clouds and public clouds. Nothing else.
 
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