Monday, June 21, 2010

Tin-huggers the big problem for cloud adoption

Going through yet another one of those "holy crap that infrastructure is expensive" occasions recently I did a quick calculation and found that we could get all of our capacity at an absolute fraction of the internal price. Think less than 1/10th of the quoted price when installation was factored in.

What stopped us shifting? Well a little bit of compliance, which we might have overcome, but the big stopper were the tin-huggers.

Tin-huggers are people who live by the old adage "I don't understand the software, I don't understand the hardware but I can see the flashing lights" which I've commented on before.

Tin-huggers love their tin, they love the network switches, they love the CPU counts and worrying about "shared", "dedicated", "virtualised" and all of those things. They love having to manually upgrade memory and having to select storage months or years in advance. Above all of these things they love the idea that there is a corner of some data centre that they could take their tin-hugging mates into and point and say "that is my stuff".

Tin-huggers hate clouds because they don't know where the data centre is and their tin-hugger mates would laugh at them and say "HA! Google/Amazon/Microsoft/etc own that tin, you've just got some software". This makes the tin-hugger sad and so the tin-hugger will do anything they can to avoid the cloud. This means they'll play the FUDmeister card to the max and in this they have a real card to play...

Tin-huggers are the only ones who work in hardware infrastructure design, software people couldn't give a stuff.

This means its all tin-huggers making the infrastructure decisions, so guess what? Cloud is out.

Tin-huggers are yet another retarding force on IT. Sometimes the software folks can get it out and work with the business but too often the TIn-hugging FUDmeistering is enough to scare the business back into its box.

Its time to build a nice traditional bypass right through the tin and into the cloud and let the tin-huggers protest from their racks as we demolish them from underneath their feet.

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2 comments:

Styggiti said...

I'm curious as to what compliance issues you ran into. One of the biggest arguments I'm hearing internally to anything cloud is compliance (SOX).

No one has been able to cite specific provisions to me from the SOX 404 controls other than requiring a cloud provider to have SAS 70 cert, which pretty much all of the major players do.

7:20 am
Steve Jones said...

Hence the reason I reckoned we could get around it. SOX and data privacy were the two cited elements.

1:45 pm

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