You can’t really blame your IT staff for inflicting a private cloud—actually just a corporate data center with a fancy new name—on you. In some ways, their jobs depend upon it. Self-preservation is a powerful incentive.
Of course, your CIO’s job is only truly threatened by the public cloud if she chooses to fight it, or mindlessly continues to believe she can build a better cloud than Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. For 99.999% of enterprises, building your own cloud or data center may be a comforting way to stick with old habits, but it’s generally going to be the wrong decision.
While there are certainly workloads that will perform better or need to be secured within the four walls of your firewall, the reality is that most infrastructure belongs in the cloud.
No, You Can’t
It’s a convenient fiction that public cloud is unreliable compared to private IT. But let’s be clear: it’s fiction, not fact.
Here’s the reality on public cloud up-time: last year Amazon Web Services managed 99.9974% uptime despite hefty growth and unparalleled pressure on its infrastructure. Google was even better at 99.999% uptime. (Microsoft Azure performed a bit worse, though still quite well, according to the Cloud Harmony data.)
This is better than most enterprises can boast and, as AWS is demonstrating, the public cloud providers keep getting better at uptime.
In other words, public cloud costs considerably less than data center resources (even if dressed up as “private cloud”)—a huge advantage, by Actuate executive Bernard Golden’s estimation:
But it also performs better. And, most important of all, public cloud computing offers dramatic improvements in convenience and flexibility.
Sure, there are companies like Uber and Facebook that may be able to run infrastructure more efficiently than AWS or Microsoft, but these are the exceptions, not the rule, as Golden goes on to note.
Cloudy Forecast For IT Jobs?
None of which need threaten IT professionals. After all, “cloud” doesn’t translate into “unemployment.” Instead, it translates into “leverage.”
Take AccuWeather, for example, which discovered that the public cloud gave it the opportunity to highly leverage the relatively small IT staff it had. As Christopher Patti, vice president of Technology at AccuWeather, told CIO.com:
We don’t have a gigantic staff. In the past it took a serious amount of time to provision equipment. Now my development staff can go to the — For more information read the original article here.
