No matter what cloud computing sellers say there are
practical limitations to moving existing business technology to cloud
platforms.Most often when this is
discussed the issues of establishing the target platform, testing and
configuring, establishing management practices covering change management,
service quality, security and access and the like are central to the
discussion.
The so-called mythical man-month and the related issue of
how to use scarce IT funds is also central.Cloud computing proponents rightly will tell you that cloud operating
costs are somewhat lower than comparable in-house costs.Cloud providers are operating at scale and
usually pricing on the margin.It’s a
big cost advantage… if you don’t examine the switch-over costs.
The switch-over costs are not limited to the dollars or
Euros involved in migrating applications to Das Kloud, whether public or
private.The act of migration is
distractive.It means the halt to the
development of any new function, today, while legacy applications are migrated
to a lower-cost platform tomorrow.That’s
a bad thing.
Smaller companies with smaller applications portfolios may
feel this pinch less than medium and large firms do.But for most, the time and opportunity costs
of migrating the out-of-sight, out-of-mind legacy is too high for the
benefits.It is often best to move those
applications as they age to the point of replacement or major re-engineering.
New systems or major bolted on enhancements are a different
matter.Provided there is a reasonably
current interface available these new functions can be designed, developed and
deployed in a cloud environment and linked through the web to the legacy.
New uses of IT, like social media technologies in Marketing
2.0 applications, tend to be cloud-provisioned.Instead of coordinating and helping, old-schoolers often try to block corporate
access to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the other places where the
customers are learning about and discussing your products.
Companies
must be involved in those conversations.This drives marketing people to external clouds and creates gratuitous
governance issues for IT.IT needs to
get on board.“Resistance is
futile.”Whether that cloud is Private,
Public, or a hybrid, for most of us a cloud, by any other name, is how you
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