As a relatively new and fresh faced (no insults please) IT professional, getting to grips with the current trends and technologies around cloud has been a learning curve. With the majority of the main current global IT and cloud platforms providing a variety of services around Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Infrastucture-as-a-Service (IaaS) to name but a few, it presents a real challenge for organisations to create a strategic path within their IT departments to satisfy all of the functional needs of the business.
One of the key questions that I frequently receive from decision makers that have yet to adopt the cloud, is why should their business use it and what benefits could it possibly bring? With the ever-increasing acceleration in IT innovation, we are now at a stage where the cloud has matured and is now a viable option for future proofing a company’s IT estate. Instant scalability of an organisation’s environment means that in times of high traffic (e.g. clearing for Universities or Black Friday for retailers) they are able to modify their consumption of the cloud, insuring they only allocate what is needed. Also, the instant provisioning of instances with this new flexibility means that testing and development instances can be created within minutes, in comparison to the weeks it would take before.
Another of the key points of the debate around cloud revolves around whether security is still an issue. Gartner* sums this up by saying “Through 2022, at least 95% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault”. To cut a long story short, security in the cloud has vastly improved and while there is still a stigma around this, in reality this is no longer the issue it once was.
So where does that leave organisations who are looking at their IT strategies? In truth, every business will have a different pathway that works for them. Whether this is to engage with a third-party consultancy to help map this out or whether to internally hire a workforce to deal with this, both approaches have their positives and negatives. On top of this, if an organisation is primarily focused on maintaining a CAPEX model, then On-Premises is the way forward. If they seek to move more to an OPEX model, then the cloud is a good pathway to take.
So, what are your views on this? What do you agree or disagree with? I would love to hear your thoughts!
*REF: https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/is-the-cloud-secure/
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