by James Staten on October 25, 2011
You know there are developers in your company
using public cloud platforms but do you really know what they are doing? You
suspect it’s just test and development work but are you sure? And if it is production
workloads are they taking the steps necessary to protect the company? We have
the answers to these questions and you may be surprised by how far they are
going.
It’s tough being an infrastructure &
operations professional these days. According to our ForrSight
surveys for every
cloud project you know about there could be 3 to 6 others you don’t know about.
Business unit leaders, marketing and sales professionals and Empowered developers are leading the charge. They aren’t
circumventing I&O as a sign of rebellion – they simply are trying to move
quickly to drive revenue and increase productivity. While every I&O
professional should be concerned about this pattern of shadow IT and
its implications on the role of I&O in the future, the more immediate
concern is about whether these shadow efforts are putting the company at risk.
The bottom line: Cloud use isn’t just test and
development. In
fact, according to our ForrSight research there’s more production use of IaaS
cloud platforms than test and development and broader use is coming (see Figure
1 below). The prominent uses are for training, product demonstration and other
marketing purposes. Our research also shows that test and development projects
in the cloud are just as likely to go to production in the cloud as they are to
come back to your data center.
So how much should you be concerned about this
trend? Well first off, you can probably forget about trying to stop it. Your
focus should be on determining how much risk there is in this pattern and this
may take a leap of faith on your part because as of right now, your developers
know more about how to use public cloud platforms than you do. This means they
are more knowledgeable than you about what it takes to make them highly
available and secure. This experience deficit is a much more problematic issue
than anything else because when you start asking your developers what they are
doing to ensure the availability of their applications on IaaS, you don’t
really even know what to ask.
Sure, you can ask what they are doing to ensure
availability but do you even know what the availability options are on the
leading clouds and how best to leverage them? Do you know what data replication
takes place by default and what options they could turn on?
At the same time, you can’t just trust the
developers to care as much about data integrity, BCDR and availability as you
do because, normally, they entrust this to you. So rather than engage in a
frustrating back and forth that risks misunderstanding by both parties, let’s
see if we can accelerate your learnings, bring these cloud efforts out of the
shadows so you can learn exactly what is going on and how much you really
should be worried.
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