Why the Cloud Scares Traditional IT

There are a lot of people that have a background in “traditional IT”. But, now is the time for the cloud computing to become commonplace. Over the last few years, hybrid and public cloud solutions have become a serious topic of discussion. In many cases, there has also been contention. Customers who have a handle on the excitement of new features being released would dismiss any idea of taking a hybrid or public cloud approach. Off premises cloud environments are surrounded by a lot of marketing hype. The IT departments had legitimate concerns about security and compliance.

Cloud Concerns

It is easy to understand the concerns, and most IT departments agree. The cloud model is very intimidating. If you have ever had control over all aspects of your IT environment for a few decades, you may not want to give up your access to your infrastructure, much less have to trust another company to protect all your critical company data and information. Lately, those concerns are beginning to fade. The cloud is different now, but your companies approach should still be the same.

Enterprise Engineers and Developer

Enterprise engineers and developers of your company should still have to be able to serve as an architect to help determine the best functional and operational requirements for their services. Those people need to decide the suitability of any given platform for the computing workload and still fulfill the company’s objectives and core competencies.

This type of approach may make sense for some service providers and integrators because the infrastructure resources are the core components of the business. Over time, most internal IT departments end up carving out an infrastructure revenue stream that is totally unrelated to the core business.

Instead of going ahead and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in capital to build out the infrastructure, most businesses cloud possibly be investing those resources into developing and marketing their core business area.

Now more than ever, the responsibility of the core business line to be able to validate the internal IT strategies and to evaluate alternatives. The public cloud is not always the right answer for all the workloads. But, driven by the fast evolving IaaS, PaaS and SaaS offerings, a lot of businesses will begin to see significant benefits.

To better understand the cloud, visit Cloud Computing on NIST.com.