Stop being a cloud lemming... let’s claim the IT industry back!

Firstly I take my hat off to Amazon and what it has achieved with AWS. Amazon has taken its experience in retail and applied it to create a supermarket style, volume driven business. The genius is in the way it has achieved this and in doing so, has created a new annuity model for selling IT infrastructure. Its development of the platform has been phenomenal and it has now taken this to a level where the software layer is so complex that competitors such as Rackspace are using this as a stick to beat them with. The rise in the number of AWS independent consultants and cloud service brokers underlines this. When Amazon had an outage last month the world’s fastest growing website, Pinterest, and sites like Heroku, went down for several hours so you have to ask why they didn’t configure multiple availability zones.... is it just that it’s too complex, or is there a deeper issue? The knock on effect of Amazon’s success is a stampede from the IT industry trying to ape this success and in many cases throwing away its own experience from the last three decades around best practice IT. IT companies, desperate to put the word ‘cloud’ on their websites, are just buying the ready meal equivalent of the cloud industry – effectively a piece of self service software which sits on a hypervisor, some of which have very questionable security. The main reason I am writing this article is to try and put perspective on what is happening in the cloud and I realise that with a job title of ‘Director of Cloud Services’ I am the world’s biggest hypocrite. Amazon has created an amazing IT delivery model based on the efficiencies of virtualisation and I absolutely love it. I also love the term ‘cloud’ even if it’s a bit of a metaphor - both of these are here to stay. But Amazon is a retailer whose model is built on volume and it is very reluctant to take responsibility for delivering the full IT stack so the onus (and risk) of course goes back on the customer. This may be fine for test and dev purposes, but how resilient is a CIO going to be shouldering the risk for production, business critical apps? Managed IT Services are the cornerstone of the IT industry, my industry, the ability to tell a customer that backups, DR, database management, patching, and security are our responsibility and we won’t just stop at the point that allows us to scale with the most efficient head count. It’s an industry that’s built on best practice and customer relationships where we care about the mutual partnership to deliver a solution. My rallying call is that although the retail sector has taught IT companies a lesson in innovation, now is the time for us to take our industry back. We need to use the cloud operational model to provide agility, but let’s reclaim responsibility and make ‘as a service’ really mean ‘best practice IT managed service’ without compromising our principles – rather than trying to pick up crumbs that fall from a retailers table.