www.binfo.co.uk
magazine
14
Opinion
IT departments – they discovered that
these departments were routinely
buying between 50% to 100% more
IT kit than they needed.Why? Because
some junior employees felt that the
systems might go down so they needed
this redundancy.
I don’t need to point out to you,
in these straitened fnancial times
when we are “all in it together,” that
this profigacy astounded the directors
who have been diligently pruning the
fat for years.While they have been
reading up on Cloud computing to save
money their subordinates have been
acting as though it were still the 1970s
when servers were as reliable as 1970s
Skodas and have been ordering 100%
more than they needed in case they
malfunctioned. But today’s servers have
only a 1% chance of going down; they
have no moving parts – no fans and no
old-fashioned hard discs to go wrong;
they are power effcient and don’t get
red hot. In other words, they don’t have
to be Molly-Coddled any more and the
only people who are yet to realise it are
those paying the bills.
Even in this
new world of
virtualisation,
IT departments
ordering hardware
regularly over-order
to the tune of
millions of pounds
because they don’t
want to be in the
fring line if the
systems go down. I
have seen SME systems
which could drive nuclear
power stations ten times over,
while the Chief Executive Offcer signs
the spending cheques and makes cuts
elsewhere ‘safe’ in the knowledge that
his IT will not malfunction. Redundancy
is a good thing but this has now grown
to monstrous proportions. The same
thing happens to an even worse extent
in the public sector.
This mismatch between the thinking
of some IT departments and the
priorities of the board is becoming one
There are some trends which are
artifcially created. I cannot believe,
for example, that next year’s fashion
trends for Spring have already been
decided. But according to my wife’s
glossiest magazine they are all set in
stone.
Information Technology (IT) can
sometimes be as fckle as a fashion
magazine. Trends come and go and often
for no good reason. But IT usually gets it
right in the end, doesn’t it? So that old
late-lamented trend for Shared Services
is back with a bang this Autumn – but
this time it’s called the Cloud and it’s
here to stay. I say that because in the last
few months I’ve been advising a growing
number of companies that have started
to talk to each other about IT and made
some rather unpleasant discoveries.
One major company I deal with
has a number of subsidiaries which all
operate as a virtual group. Their directors
started to investigate how they could
share services and hopefully save money.
As they examined their existing IT
setup – four separate and autonomous
Costas Galonis, Chief Technology
Offcer of Cirrus Stratus, explains
why cloud computing is more than
just a passing fad.
Surge in demand for shared
services from SMEs puts
Cloud in fashion
of the key drivers of Cloud Computing.
The board no longer accepts that the IT
department cannot be touched when
sacrifces have to be made. I am seeing
the start of a trend where boards are not
going to tolerate hardware humming at
10% capacity (a not unusual situation)
just because the most pessimistic person
in IT wants a 90% margin for error! The
Board is becoming aware that it can buy
little bits of the Cloud when it wants to
and cut down when it needs to.
Effcient, conscientious and confdent
IT staff will breathe a sigh of relief that the
benefts of a proper serviced environment,
the Cloud, are becoming clearer. These IT
staff will not only keep their jobs but will
be hailed as the instigators of welcome
change and progress.
The virtual group of companies I
mentioned before are now looking to
the Cloud.With the right Service Level
Agreements and the choice of a truly
competent and reliable Cloud supplier
they can scale up or down as much or as
little as they choose. As a group they have
the scale to construct a good deal from
their Cloud supplier. They don’t even need
PCs with expensive hardware and software
to keep – the cost of the PC is being cut
out of the balance sheet.
Security and reliability are worries but
they are not great enough to concern
any organisation with the correct
security policies – the biggest IT security
threats are typically
‘insider threats’ which
are greatly reduced
with Cloud
services.
The
new trend
for this
Autumn, as
CEOs, CTOs
and Finance
Offcers return
to their desks
from their
summer
holidays, will be
Cloud computing.
It’s this year’s new
model and it will be in
fashion from now on.
Constantine Galonis, Founder and CTO
of Cirrus Stratus, has worked in the IT
industry since 1980. Since 1996, he has
run the Art of Computing Limited, an IT
Consultancy specialising in server-based
solutions and virtualisation. In 2009,
he founded cloud hosted solutions
provider Cirrus Stratus.
www.cirrusstratus.com