CIO OPINION
We ’ re also no longer fixing potential outages – that burden and expense has shifted to the provider , and while we may experience a loss of income during an outage , we won ’ t also pay for the outage repairs .
The truth is that the total cost of ownership for a cloud deployment is far less than many CIOs are calculating .
Shifting tasks
I ’ ve been at countless roundtables now and mixed with dozens of CIOs , and going full cloud is anathema to many these days . The default is some version of hybrid , and many are looking at on-prem as the more dominant solution , jaded by outages , OPEX costs , cybersecurity concerns and more .
While you can ’ t outsource risk , you can shift many of the time-consuming administration and maintenance tasks that contribute to overall risk profile . And let ’ s face it ; how effective are we at staying on top of the on-going maintenance of the lower levels of our cloud environments ?
hardware , provide a sound HVAC environment for the hardware , and ensure that you are patching , securing and updating both the hardware and software stacks .
At that point , you ’ re not only spending on hardware and labor , but also real estate and travel time .
Furthermore , we now can release an internal resource to do something completely different for a change instead of testing and re-testing patches to hardware , firmware and hypervisors within our unique environment .
Calculating savings
We need to calculate how much time we ’ re actually saving as well in a cloud environment . We ’ re no longer doing maintenance to storage , compute and hypervisors , for instance – it just happens . We no longer need to dedicate a resource to implementing a patch , testing it within an environment and more .
ABOUT BEN WATERHOUSE
Ben Waterhouse is the CIO of Coates , Australia ’ s leading national equipment hire and solutions provider . He has nearly two decades of experience in the IT sector , with more than 13 at Coates alone . Waterhouse has led Coates ’ IT strategy as its CIO since 2018 .
With cloud , we ’ ve been able to shift that burden to another provider whose sole purpose is to stay online and secure as much as possible . Do we want sole responsibility back ? If there is an outage of our on-premise infrastructure , or a vulnerability is found , do we seriously believe we ’ ll be able to remedy the issue faster than a company whose business relies on being ‘ always on ’ and meeting strict SLAs ?
Due diligence
Do your due diligence . Make sure the cloud environment you ’ re migrating too meets your unique requirements . If you do need something on-prem , make sure you ’ re doing so for the right reasons ( reduced latency , for instance ) and not because you ’ re blinded by a simple CAPEX versus long-term OPEX calculation .
But let ’ s not overthink this . Unless we run a significant engineering team , we cannot and will not be able to provide what a cloud provider can . These companies are multibillion-dollar behemoths for a reason ; they know what they ’ re doing , and the benefits are clear .
Take advantage of the economies of scale , reduced risk and everything they provide , because the truth is they ’ re good at what they do and better than us at cloud . Let them do what they do best so you can do what you do best , such as looking at innovative ways to catapult your company forward . p
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