Cloud is the New Way to Think About Your Datacenter

Traditional Model

Most companies are running custom applications that are stitched together, they have purpose-built hardware to think about, and have specialised teams, and everything has been carefully customised (over many years in some cases!).

This is of course done for all the right reasons, but you might consider that it might be holding your business back in many ways given that the business context has changed fundamentally. In this new age of apps, the traditional model causes friction because IT isn’t moving as fast as business wants it to.

This is manifested in developers not getting the speed and freedom they need to create the best end-user experiences. That leads to lost productivity on their side, which results in ‘Shadow IT’. In 2015, 42% of the technology budget resides outside IT; this will grow to 50% by 2020 (Gartner).

Cloud Model

Now let’s look at the cloud. Everyone knows that the cloud offers agility and innovation. It’s proving itself to be the way forward for the modern enterprise and we’ll talk more about that in a bit. But for some of our IT customers, the cloud might seem a little daunting. They might be asking, “Is this something I want to lead the charge on? How does it help my career? The tension some of them experience is because you’re not sure if things are consistent with what you’re doing on-premises and it seems like it will be hard to manage.

There’s also a tension between developers who want speed and freedom (represented by business demands), and the IT folks who have to worry about things like security and compliance.