Thanks to my friend @rssanborn for tweeting this 2015 Cloud Checklist:
Accept that many cloud providers already are better at security than you are.- Private clouds should not be your end game.
- Know how to structure contracts.
- Understand the workloads you’re supporting.
- Seek coordination (not control) of cloud resources.
#5 in particular caught my attention. It speaks to some of the issues I’ve written about in this post about cloud politics and the role of data integration. I like how the author of the CIO Insight post, Tony Contzer, puts it:
“Those who try to put the kibosh on a business unit’s rogue adoption of cloud services are on the same fruitless path as the CIOs who fought Web browsers and voice over IP.”
The article features a few choice quotes from Gartner‘s Daryl Plummer (see his video interview in this post). He notes:
“Business units are not going to let you take back control. You can’t put the horse back in the barn.”
I was recently interviewed by Leigh Dow at ITToolbox and put it this way:
“With the SaaS model, the business can just go get software, do a trial with a credit card and start adopting and managing SaaS applications autonomously. What often happens is a spiral of tools manifest in the company and at some point you get “SaaS sprawl.” No different than what we saw in BI in the Data Warehousing space when data marts popped up and at some point they needed to be consolidated. It is becoming a huge problem for IT. One customer told me, “we need to get on this cloud train or get run over by it”. Being the “department of no” isn’t an option.“
Related Articles
- ‘Go to’ clouds of the future, part 2 (news.cnet.com)
- Whose data is it anyway? (go.theregister.com)
- Gartner Forecasts 16% Increase In Enterprise SaaS Revenue During 2011 (cloudave.com)
In(tegrate) the Clouds 
Nice article. Really interesting point you have made – “Seek coordination (not control) of cloud resources.”