One of the IT department’s less official roles has been as a gatekeeper to an organisations infrastructure. The cost and time to market constraints that are sometimes imposed by internal IT can lead to applications being cancelled and even to not being proposed in the first place. By allowing the business to side-step the IT department though, cloud computing enables departments and individuals within organisations to get new applications up and running quickly and with investment largely focussed on development.
Where internal IT is imposing unreasonable delays and costs, this is going to be great for businesses. There are some major caveats to add though. In particular, a lot of the governance and ‘red-tape’ that internal IT seems to impose is actually about protecting an organisation’s data. By checking that things like backup and recovery have been considered and planned for, IT ensures that an organisation’s data, reputation and ultimately it’s business are protected. Where those checks are bypassed, it is fair to expect that the ‘boring’ aspects of application development and deployment will not get the attention the really require. The litany of data loss horror stories never seems to abate. Cloud computing service providers may provide the tools to implement effective backups, but that won’t guarantee that developers will use them.
To be clear, the threat here is not that organisations will use cloud computing, which will be a great addition to the IT tool-box. The threat is the same as that posed by applications running on servers sitting under people’s desks; It is the same thread as that posed by data that leaks on portable drives; The threat is that broken governance can lead to no governance and that organisations will be compromised as a result.
The solution is for internal IT and their management to build cloud computing into their governance and release management models. In much the same way as for suppliers of physical infrastructure, organisations need to choose their suppliers and build standards for development and deployment . By doing this, they can ensure that all applications, whether hosted internally or in the cloud are checked to ensure compliance with data protection, availability and security requirements.
There’s something else to say here though and that’s to remember quite how much due diligence vendors of physical infrastructure are put through before purchase decisions are made. Ultimately, even an SLA isn’t really enough unless you are convinced that the organisation to which you are trusting your data is able to follow through on their promises. I wonder what the cloud services RFP equivalent of a double disk pull will be?
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