Cloud adoption is highest among startups, primarily because smaller businesses often don’t have existing infrastructure – rather than purchasing it directly, they rent it through cloud providers.
Cloud adoption among larger organisations is still in its infancy for a couple of reasons. One is simply that many aren’t ready or don’t know enough about the cloud. Another is that many organisations have already spent money deploying the sort of infrastructure that the cloud provides. If a business has solid infrastructure in place, the cloud is a less attractive proposition.
Face your fear
It’s fair to say that many IT pros fear that moving to the cloud is functionally equivalent to outsourcing a good part of their own job to a provider. While these fears are not entirely unfounded, the best way to overcome any fear is to learn more about what you’re afraid of. Even though enterprise cloud adoption is in its infancy, there are several reasons it would benefit IT pros to understand the technologies the cloud offers.
IT workers in enterprises, for example, will need to answer questions about whether it makes sense for their organisation to move some or all of their resources to the cloud. Management is naturally going to be curious about the cloud, especially given the claims around the drastic reduction in operational expenditure. The advice of someone with a good working knowledge of what the cloud can and cannot do – as well as the potential the risks and rewards – will be much more compelling than that of someone who is only passingly familiar with the opportunities the cloud provides.
Knowledge is power
The key take away here is that IT pros aren’t just employed to keep the infrastructure humming – they also serve a very important role as advisor to the business. IT workers know an organisation’s IT requirements because they contend with them every day. To keep that advisor role, IT pros need to remain impartial and avoid offering guidance that seems to favour their own career aspirations.
The marketing strategy of some cloud providers is to target CIOs rather than IT. The marketing people know that IT is suspicious of the cloud, which is why they push the cost angle so forcefully at upper level management. The reality is that marketing can only do an end-run around the IT department if its workers are unprepared, with no working knowledge of all the options.
Learn by doing
Luckily for those working in IT, it is fairly simple to become conversant with the technical details of what each cloud provider offers. Not only does each cloud provider have an extensive library of frequently updated training material, most offer trial versions of their services.
When it comes to learning, the trick for most IT pros is to do something practical. I first started learning how one provider worked after deciding to see if I could figure out how to get a Minecraft server running for my son in a cloud-hosted virtual machine. Doing so taught me quite a bit about deploying a virtual machine in the cloud as well as issues around creating VPN connections to cloud networks.
I also learnt some of the relative drawbacks and benefits of running a virtual machine in the cloud as opposed to running it in an on-premises hypervisor.
Although running a Minecraft server in the cloud may sound like a humorous diversion, an IT pro who figures out how to do this for themselves has already learnt enough to start making informed choices about the benefits and drawbacks of on-premises virtualised workloads versus cloud hosted virtualised workloads.
Be the trusted advisor
The companies encouraging organisations to adopt the cloud are pushing hard. They have sales targets to meet. The only way an IT worker is going to cut through the marketing spin aimed at their organisation’s decision makers is to be completely on top of the technical details of how the business might use the cloud, even if that might not be the right path in the long run.
Understanding how the cloud works will help you provide a strong assessment of whether it should replace or complement your current IT deployment. At some point, management will query IT pros about whether the cloud makes sense for the organisation. When that query comes, the worker who has evidence for their opinion is going to be far more compelling than those who make vague generalisations.
