I’m still getting my sea legs in the world of enterprise IT. It’s not something I’m proud of, but there’s no sense denying it. One of the things that constantly strikes me is how often enterprise IT issues don’t involve actual technology. At some point, technology issues become subsumed in a wider lens: organizational problems. It’s something I never thought about before, yet makes complete sense.
Keith Townsend shared his reaction to a post by Subbu Allamaraju, the VP of Cloud at Expedia, and the issue at hand in the reaction perfectly illustrates this point. Keith warms against moving too quickly to embrace the public cloud as the panacea for IT problems. This may work for traditional technology companies, who have an ingrained culture of prioritizing application development. But for more traditional businesses, moving to the public cloud simply as a way to jolt your company IT culture may prove problematic, and ultimately counterproductive.
As an outsider coming at the enterprise space, it’s interesting to see the challenges that emerge with scale. This includes the challenges of technology, how and when to scale to serve growing traffic. But it’s also about organizations constantly learning how to deal with cultural changes and challenges.
The CTO Advisor comments:
A cloud executive and engineer that I highly respect wrote a blog post detailing why he believes CIO’s should avoid building private clouds. Subbu Allamaraju comes from Yahoo and Ebay. He knows private clouds extremely well. He’s now the VP of Cloud at Expedia. So, he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to building and managing private clouds. I don’t doubt any of his advice. I found the advice well thought from his lens.
As he mentioned in his blog post, he has debated his thoughts with his peers. So, smart people don’t agree. I wanted to capture some additional points when considering private cloud.
Read more at: Don’t be quick to build or migrate to cloud
