The Cloud? You Ain't READY for the CLOUD! (Or ARE You??)

Maybe you are and maybe you aren't. I mean, I have no way of knowing, really. But I've been hearing...things that are making me...nervous.

I mean, it's not like I'm a conspiracy theorist or anything. (I lean more toward Harry Shearer's thinking on conspiracies, which he has publicly deemed unlikely, given the difficulty of getting people to work together in simple, small teams.) But still, I've been hearing...things...

Things like that there are companies out there for which cloud-based solutions would make a lot of sense, if those companies had processes in place for accurate, fair and balanced evaluation and comparison of such solutions, with one another and with their premise-based alternatives. Or if those companies had IT solution acquisition policies and processes designed with only premise-based solutions in mind.

Now, it's not as if the business IT solutions vendors are making any of this easy. Microsoft representatives have said publicly and repeatedly that delivering purchase and support agreements that gracefully embrace premise- and cloud-based solutions is very much still a work in progress. And Microsoft isn't the only vendor that needs to address this problem rapidly and effectively.

But I can't help but think that IT people who really, really want every dollar of company money they spend to deliver business value would be pushing their companies to become more able to assess, acquire and deploy cloud-based solutions. Unless those IT people had...reasons to complicate or make impossible the assessment and adoption of cloud-based solutions at their companies.

What might those reasons be? Well, I'd hate to speculate. But I remember when minicomputers, PCs, client-server computing, the Internet and the Web were all poo-poohed by IT decision-makers who saw these new technologies as irrelevant to "real" business computing at best and threats to the comfortable status quo at worst. ("Why should I be forced to learn to manage new technologies or vendor relationships when I already understand the ones we have?" I'm just sayin'...)

So is it a conspiracy? Are IT people, individually or collectively, secretively taking arms against a sea of cloud-based threats, hoping by opposing them to end them? (That's generations of Shakespeare fans moaning in the background.) I sincerely doubt it...but I keep hearing these...things...

Anyway, enough of my semi-paranoid, only-partly-tongue-in-cheek ramblings. What do you think about all this? There's a discussion going on right now at Focus.com and another on LinkedIn in the IT Focus Expert Group. Or feel free to leave a comment here, or to drop me a line at medortch@dortchonit.com.