To Cloud Or Not To Cloud?
3 min read
I have seen the light. The Cloud movement has matured to the point of usefulness beyond a different name for SaaS (Software as a Service), which most cloud services are. However, the needs for Cloud adoption have evolved and demanded that the SaaS only offerings evolve along side.
For a while I was anti-Cloud. I hated the term. I hated the messaging. I knew too much on the back end what Cloud, at the time, really was… an application/software as a service. That’s all. But now things have changed. Using simplistic terms the Cloud is a SaaS, IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Processing as a Service), WaaS (workload as a service), and so on. The Cloud is starting to remove all of the costs of needing to have a deep expertise IT department at every business location. Cloud can allow you to have pocketbook room for visionaries, strategists, business experts, subject matter experts in a specific function rather than having to choose on those or a fleet of mid-range engineers to maintain the IT machine.
However, the Cloud is not for everyone and for everything. If you have a top level executive preaching from the cube-tops that his/her 3 year strategy is to Cloud everything, turn and run. The Cloud is not for everything and if anyone, vendor or leader, says otherwise they are off a tad. For example, who in their right might would put their Active Directory in the Cloud? Now, having it in a managed datacenter doesn’t count as Cloud. No one would give up full administrative grips on their core account system. Mainframes? Mergers and Acquisition research documents? The list goes on. There are somethings that do not belong outside of your sphere of control.
Take some of the Cloud capabilities that are now becoming available and valuable and compare them to your home. You may or may not fall into this category. Your home has a yard, plants, flowers, weeds and those need to be maintained, grown, cared for. Now, you may have designed the layout and maybe even planted them but the everyday care of those plants is very time consuming. Watering, weeding, fertilizing, trimming, mowing the grass. Your time spent doing that maintenance is taken away from finishing putting up the shelves in the garage, painting the bedroom, cleaning the basement. So you have an option to use other services, that may be more expensive than the raw materials, but you get better service, reliable routines, and you can no focus more on the internal improvements and advancements of your home.
Cloud lets you paint the bedroom that you have been putting off because you have no time or can’t risk taking time away from letting the weeds get out of control to do it!
I see the light now. My expertise is bedroom painting (figuratively) and internal home improvement within the confines of my home’s walls. By externalizing and streamlining those external services – weed service, automatic lawn watering through a weather smart sprinkler system, and routinely cut grass I was able to build up the garage, finish the basement, fix the knick knacks that were always put off. More expensive from a dollar value but from a total wholistic value it was a good investment because the invisible measurement of time and stress must be taken into account.
Do you need your bedroom painted?
End of Line.
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Binary Blogger
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Binary Blogger has spent 20 years in the Information Security space currently providing security solutions and evangelism to clients. From early web application programming, system administration, senior management to enterprise consulting I provide practical security analysis and solutions to help companies and individuals figure out HOW to be secure every day.
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