Cloud Computing: Stealth IT?

With apologies to John Lennon, who said “Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.”

Forbes Insight forwarded a very interesting report to me, based on a large survey it conducted (sponsored by EMC, I think) regarding enterprise cloud computing plans. The Number One key finding:

Cloud computing projects are still at an early stage at most companies if they are happening at all. However, the overwhelming majority of IT executives have at least begun evaluating the benefits of cloud technology, with much of their focus on “private cloud.”

The report outlines the deliberate pace senior IT management is taking with respect to cloud computing. They are very interested in it; however, they are concerned about obstacles like security, application migration, and staff willingness to embrace new technologies.

This approach certainly echoes what most trade papers and the analyst groups publish -- that cloud computing is interesting, holds great potential, but concerns remain; the future official direction for most IT organizations is to build a cloud in their own internal data center, which addresses many of the concerns about cloud computing.

On the other hand, I saw a tweet from James Staten, Principal Analyst at Forrester, who focuses on cloud computing. It went along these lines:

In meeting. IT Ops says no public cloud use, it's forbidden. IT Dev says we use cloud all the time. Oops!

It seems behavior does not align with policy. This disconnect is reinforced by this article in BusinessWeek about Amazon Web Services, in which Goldman Sachs estimates that AWS accounts for about 77% of all cloud computing being done right now.

What does this disconnect imply? Well, to echo John Lennon, while senior IT management is planning out its future life, people in the trenches are carrying on with getting things done via cloud computing, particularly the AWS variant. By the time the official plan for the private cloud is released, it may be obsolete, overridden by events it was unaware of. In other words, the gussied-up strategic plan may be rendered moot by a de facto cloud strategy based on tactical initiatives.

Another challenge, in my view, is the likely result of this de facto strategy: the return of all those tactical apps back to IT operations, as the developers and business units that created them realize that running operations isn't nearly as fun as creating applications. I call this "The Cloud Boomerang," to symbolize the unexpected return of applications to operations, which probably was unaware of their existence and certainly had no influence on their design or implementation. You can see more about "The Cloud Boomerang" in this YouTube video I put up.

I can't shake the sense that IT executives don't recognize the momentum of cloud computing and are operating on completely different timescales to the facts on the ground. Put another way, cloud computing is what happens while you're making other plans.

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