The Adventures of a “Not So Lucky” Enterprise Cloud Pioneer

Why can’t every CIO be as lucky as Jim Barton?  The mythical man, with not one iota of technology expertise, is thrown into a seemingly inescapable trap of leading fictional IVK Corporation through data security breaches, web site denial-of-attacks and other corporate information technology maladies.   Yet, somehow he manages to escape them all with only a whiteboard, sporadic counsel from his ever-absent girlfriend and some “young kid” who he randomly hangs out with at a local burger joint.  (For those who have yet to read, Adventures of an IT Leader, it’s better entertainment than a sharp stick in the eye.  That is, unless, your job title is Chief Information Officer.  For those unfortunate souls, it feels way too much like work but with a much happier ending.)

For example, take Pulte Homes’ foray into the cloud as described in CIO Insights’ Know It All September 26, 2009 column.  Cloud computing [aka utility computing, on-demand computing, grid computing] is a contemporary computing style in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are housed outside of one’s own data center and “automagically” provided as an on-demand service over the Internet. Better yet, most commonly pay for the services “by the drink” thus eliminating the need for large upfront data center investments and continuing support fees.  [Yes, after several years and millions spent virtualizing their existing data center assets (e.g., servers, storage, etc…), the technology delivery paradigm has shifted once again on our CIO brethren.]  For example, need server hardware, operating systems software and storage immediately?  Call Amazon’s EC2 for Infrastructure-as-a-service [IAAS] to provision your variable needs.  Does your business require a customer relationship management system tomorrow?  Phone salesforce.com for their CRM Software-as-a-service [SAAS] and you’ll be up and running as soon as your credit card is authorized.  Sounds remarkable easy, eh?

Well, like an emerging business technology trend, it’s critical to define an adoption roadmap for the unique goals and strategy of your organization.  Recall earlier this century when traditional outsourcing arrangements [e.g., the US Navy/EDS debacle] were fraught with scope, contracting and knowledge transfer risks that often manifested as issues.  Much the same can be said for cloud migration.  Without a detailed architecture and transformation roadmap the risk of “taking an arrow” unfortunately increases significantly - pioneer or established settler.  And, as in the rest of life’s travails, a little luck doesn’t hurt either. 

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