Cloud Computing Will Cause Three IT Revolutions

Today, IT organizations interpose a large set of processes and requirements in the provisioning process. Budget requests, discussions with the various operations groups like network and storage, scheduling meetings, all surrounded with lots of paperwork. And these mechanisms make sense for an environment in which they help ration scare resources. They are in place to ensure that each precious resource is devoted to its highest possible use.

The problem is that these mechanisms are orthogonal to the streamlined, short-duration provisioning associated with cloud computing (the au courant term is orchestration, representing the unified bringing together of resource assignment in an automated manner). In effect, there is an impedance mismatch between the operational implications of cloud computing and the organizational artifacts that exist today. And, as noted at the start of this piece, any time this kind of mismatch occurs, there is bound to be organizational conflict -- carried on at the level of technical discussion. After all, no one is going to say about cloud computing, "I don't like it because I'm not sure how my job managing the installation and configuration of servers will be needed when someone can just fill out a web form and have the infrastructure itself arrange for the provisioning."

So how will this play out and who will be the winners and losers

Winners: Apps groups. Apps groups are driven by business groups, many of which are frustrated by not being able to react to urgent business pressure. This is not to mention the frustration many feel when confronted by the "owners" of the resources who assert their judgment as to whether the request is justified. Bypassing all of this organizational overhead and being able to react much more quickly to business developments is a huge win. Expect to see enormous pressure from apps groups to "get on the cloud." And if the operations groups don't respond quickly enough, expect to see the apps groups look to outside providers which have a financial incentive to respond immediately. (I addressed this in my last post, here).

Winners: Apps groups (2). The high-friction provisioning process hasn't merely been the result of rationing by the operations groups. This rationing process ends up being backed into the apps groups themselves, where different business applications vie to be put onto the request list. This has the inevitable outcome that many business applications never "make the cut" to be submitted for resources. And often, these are the applications that represent innovative but unproven applications of information technology. The process goes something like "well, we know we *have* to schedule the upgrade of the XYZ package, and we know we need to refresh the hardware that the ABC application runs on, so that pretty much covers what we can do this quarter. Bob, sorry that we can't address your application that matches our customer complaints against our manufacturer partner's trouble tickets to see if we can identify breakdown patterns." Low-priority applications will have much more opportunity in a cloud computing world. A complement to this is the inevitable overall growth in the use of IT resources.