Pathway to Stable, Strong IT Infrastructure

The “Pokémon Go” application uses Google Cloud for its backend infrastructure and my company like many others is making significant moves and investments in cloud technology. We would be hard-pressed to find too many startups that are building out their own infrastructure and not leveraging services like AWS, Azure, etc. So, I started to wonder, can the “consumerization of IT” and the fact that many of our users or employees can find or buy their own apps, without the need for IT to implement and deploy systems in the traditional client/server or internal data center approach, be causing us to accept infrastructure that is “just OK.”

In the enterprise world, IT leaders and their staff are graded on and expected to have their corporate systems running optimally, efficiently and reliably. Our infrastructure teams spend significant amounts of their time monitoring, analyzing and proactively testing systems to try and reach the six-sigma standards, which we have all grown up striving to achieve. Yet, in the consumer world, what I hear my daughters say and even I find myself being OK with, are systems and apps going down and not being available 100 percent of the time.

Does this mean that as we move more systems to the cloud, we need to spend more time focusing on messaging and expectations— communicating with our employees that their systems may go down more frequently and that it’s OK, because that’s what happens in their personal lives? I know that my licensing and infrastructure teams heavily scrutinize cloud vendor contracts to make sure they are providing solid services and expect some remediation when their technologies are not available. However, just how much influence does a normal-size company have on these cloud vendors? These cloud providers don’t have unlimited budgets and resources, so they will also be under similar constraints as any corporate IT shop to run lean and generate a profit.

By no means am I advocating that we don’t utilize these cloud services. To the contrary, I’m a huge proponent and my company continues to move in that direction. However, I wonder if my daughters and the next generation of employees will grow up in a world where systems going down will be “no big deal” and “expected?” Or do we need to start working more closely with our cloud providers to make sure the best practices we’ve all been following in our internal IT shops are being adhered to and followed by all these vendors? We need to also ensure that in their zest to be “first to market” or have the “next big app,” the importance of a stable and strong infrastructure is not being sacrificed. Wait! I just had a Pokémon pop up in the room. Just hope the servers are responding.