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IT not convinced about cloud’s green credentials

IT bosses are not yet convinced over the green benefits from cloud computing, after the third annual ‘Green Survey’ from Rackspace Hosting found that cost savings and consolidation are driving the green IT agenda at the moment.

FAQ: Cloud computing demystified

The survey polled 150 Rackspace customers worldwide about their environmental strategies, and 54% admitted that cloud computing is now part of their overall environmental strategy.

And over 21% of IT managers believe that cloud computing is a much greener alternative to traditional computing infrastructures, but it seems that the vast majority still remain to be convinced.

An interesting article talking about cloud computing from Network World, a debate with colleagues that is set to continue. Is cloud for your business, for your IT? Well that’s going to depend on the nature of your business, as an Exchange support team the answer is no, you need to control your own Exchange servers, and what about data being moved and will they have servers as good as yours? As an end user or the guy paying the bill, increasingly who runs it, who supports it, is of relative dis-interest in relation to the cost of it, and it’s service. Two things need to happen going forward for IT to continue:

1. Transform from an accounting arm providing and billing back IT technologies to a mini IT service company – but properly
2. Move to more adaptive technologies that suit the business requirements

When we say properly, by this I mean end the cross charging, billing and budgets mentality to one of lowest marginal cost (per transaction), so for example, Mike logs a call his 5 year old laptop is broken, it turns out it needs a new disk. Now in current business world, IT say “sorry, it’s out of support, out of warranty, It’s £200 for a new disk, or you can have a recycled laptop”. At this point a very large buzzer should go off. Wrong answer. We’ve just wasted 1 business day visiting the laptop, running any diagnostics/checking it and speaking with the user. We’ve then created a debate and discussion about the way forward, the IT team know the answer, they know the correct way, however under cost center rules we waste time and money arguing over an issue which isn’t one, buy a new laptop. Take this to the server level and just think of how much money and trauma you’re going through unnecessarily, “can I have 256MB for my Proliant 1850R”, no you can have a new server, virtual or physical, it’s lower cost support and energy wise.

When we say adaptive technologies, looking at the technical function with the business need and seeing if we can do it at a lower cost – does the IT build server need SAN storage or a few large disks, we need to be doing what the CIO should be doing to ‘keep the show on the road’ so he or she can concentrate on funding, on investment and the strategy with the business.

The core issue is that the CIO, the head of IT is never getting told what’s going on, he only get’s involved when the head of the head, has an out of brain experience, and emails helpdesk copying in the CIO saying “Do you know who I am, I just want my laptop fixed..” So often it’s not a financial issue, it’s a delivery one, and as soon as we abstract ourselves from the financial bit, and focus on the delivery, only with the business team can we engage on support, on investment and transform our business through our IT.

Going forward with cloud in the enterprise, the way I think we’ll see IT adapt is for services to be created clouds, so the File+Print services are provided by one team globally, with a regional representatives that might look after regional infrastructure. That there might be six file servers enterprise wide, which are supported by, owned by and billed out by File+Print, rather than those services being owned by a shared infrastructure team. Just like Grid technology, there will be a grid/hpc cloud which then charges out time and capacity enterprise wide with different levels and capacities for each business need, a developer, UAT and production grid, all run by the Grid team, one team, again possibly with one or two people in each region to support the platforms or represent the team where necessary.

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