The Cloud doesn't necessarily improve service quality. It may only move it farther from your immediate control.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009 at 7:01PM Here's a great blog from Michael Krigsman that amongst other things points out how failed major software deployments remain at a staggeringly high rate and aren't projected to decrease anytime soon. That definitely resonates with me but the part I found particularly interesting was the observation that the growing trend of moving systems to the cloud will surely impact the way IT departments manage service quality. It occurs to me that IT shops choosing the cloud will now rely less on hands-on technical skills to drive quality and more on the ability to successfully manage the cloud vendor to a consistent quality result. These are sometimes similar but in many ways very different skill sets.
Believe me, it's no fun to be on the hook for a system crisis but when your own employees are working it you can rely on heroics to save the day and feel a certain sense of control (not what we recommend in "The Opposite of Luck" but sometimes necessary). It's a whole different situation when you're only recourse is to call your cloud vendor and escalate - hoping they have the skill required and the same sense of urgency as you. It seems to me that the cloud paradigm just like service outsourcing before it will require even more operational discipline in many ways than managing the systems yourself. Certainly corporate legal departments will earn their pay ensuring contract language drives the accountability on both sides of the business arrangement. The worst time to find you have little contractual leverage is after a series of terrible outages.
Reader Comments (2)
An additional area I'm tracking is the transitive risk where a SaaS vendor is also a customer of an Infrastructure as a Service provider. I'm also interested to see how independent cloud monitoring services evolve to provide all layers of the food chain visibility.
In my experience, offshoring quickly defined its place with cost/quality boundaries. SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS have great potential (for better/worse).
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