ele munjeli
Jul 20, 2017 · 2 min read

A lot of what you say here is true, especially about fear and pushing the change from the top. But it’s not really acknowledging the gap in talent that the change demands — infrastructure as code suggests that you have someone on your team that can write code, which many enterprise IT teams don’t have as they’ve been using windows GUIs for years to do everything. As a consultant I’ve had a front row seat to an awkward conversation between execs and IT personnel: execs just think of IT as generic ‘technical’ people, and IT people don’t want to lose their jobs, so when they’re told to cloud they just try with their existing skills. From a business standpoint, there’s money to be made by moving to cloud. What they don’t account for in the budget is retraining their staff — and it’s a lot of retraining, or hiring new people and training them with all the necessary domain knowledge for the enterprise- even more training in my opinion.

The first thing that has to migrate to cloud is the engineers. It’s the engineers/IT/SysAdmins that have to build and maintain the cloud; their identity architecture is the first requirement. Yet I have never seen a company acknowledge this and move to cloud by first spending 10 weeks or so to train and certify their engineering team. As a result there’s a lot of lift n’ shift out there, which as you point out, is even more expensive than a datacenter.

The solution to IT fear probably isn’t the approach you’re suggesting: a coercive showdown where they have to ‘prove’ their worth versus automation. Sure, well done cloud will save money, but domain knowledge and consistency is worth a lot too. There’s no magic bullet that will take enterprise IT to cloud; the cloud culture has to be built as well as the technology, and I’ve yet to see a company commit to that.

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ele munjeli

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DevOps, Democracy, and my cat. I’m an enterprise engineer who speaks, publishes, and codes infrastructure for virtual democracies and online deliberation.