On Cloud Cost, Pendulums & “Repatriation”
We {rightfully} hear a lot these days on what it means to use the cloud not only in terms of scalability and efficiency in IT parlance, but more and more in terms of cost — i.e., the golden era of everyone jumping on the cloud bandwagon as a goal in (and of) itself, as the defining strategy across IT departments is by all intents and purposes, over.
So what’s the prevailing narrative now?
In many ways I believe that the news is good: Key stakeholders are keen on making more informed decisions as to how they plan to position themselves onto cloud services, if not already boarded — interestingly enough, the ones that “waited things out” do possess the opportunity to start their cloud journey under better and more mature terms than before, as objectively more people in the field, across disciplines, are significantly better informed on the dangers lurking in the cloud space — that said, this is not to be considered a silver bullet.
objectively more people in the field, across disciplines, are significantly better informed on the benefits and dangers lurking in the cloud space.
We also hear more and more about “Hybrid” as a nomenclature of choice as it does seem to better depict the state of IT across different types of organizations today, where many entities experienced “sticker shock” after the cloud euphoria settled down and realized that: “hey, maybe we should be dialing things down…” which was in many ways, a knee-jerk reaction stemming from said shock — Worry not, I will not be delving into the usual pitfalls of the or a cloud journey here.
These stories have of-course multiple dimensions to them and attribution is not always as easy as it may appear to the naked eye - at the end of the day though, many organizations decided that they should be leveraging or “squeezing” more of what they already have on-premise, especially when you think about licensing life-cycles, hardware cost, etc. and it makes total sense:
They have already fronted the cash for these resources and have the people to run them, might as well utilize them.
But on occasion, you hear stories that operate under the pendulum principle — these stories have become louder recently, and I believe do merit both consideration and response:
In short, the narrative {and derivatives of} is that the cloud has proven to be a costly exercise in handing over the “keys to the kingdom”, that it’s time to “go back” and finally that, if you would be placing a bunch of similar resources side-by-side on a cloud vs. on-prem “drag race”, cloud loses every-time in speed, cost and in under certain scenarios* efficiency and scalability too — full with diagrams, before/after pictures and of course the price tag delta placed center-stage to make the point, we got the final tally as our primary vector, case closed.
the narrative (and derivatives of) is that the cloud has proven to be a costly exercise in handing over the “keys to the kingdom”.
As is usually the case though with dramatic demonstrations of any key IT infrastructure resources appearing superior to everything since sliced bread, they come with caveats, which I guess, sort of brings me back to my asterisk, my earlier point on “sticker shock” and the dangers of positioning oneself on the extremes of any strategic decision making.
We should and could contest these of types of extremes with the following questions (among many others that come to mind):
- What type of organization are you and what do you do for a “living”?
- How much are you willing to invest and {keep doing so} in highly experienced and skilled IT infrastructure personnel both culturally and monetary and what is the business justification for said investment?
- Are you local, or multi-region/global?
- What are your IT security and compliance requirements?
Ultimately, it all boils down on a host of parameters, that should be taken under careful consideration, it’s not and is never really going to be only about what looks best now, even if the numbers are “screaming” — it’s about how the organization is placing itself across a host of different elements {and more importantly time and space} that affect the calculus and decision-making.
