You’re Always Wrong About Your IT Needs and Here Is Why

One of the hardest things I have learned over my career in IT is that no matter how diligently you work to understand and meet business requirements, you almost always end up with too many or too few resources, too early or too late.

While the problem is often due to poor delivery of IT projects and product capabilities, even more frequently it is because either the anticipated business demand isn’t there (and you’re left with greatly under-utilized assets) or, the level of demand is hugely underestimated and the project becomes a victim of its own success. This has been happening more frequently, as we race into a new reality – a mobile, social web of business interactions built on the internet. Why?

In a fast accelerating world, businesses simply don’t know what they need or when they need it with enough certainty. The business is always wrong about its requirements, and IT inherits that challenge. If you ask the business, you will often find that it wants to reserve the right to change plans, adapting with maximum agility to changing circumstances without paying huge penalties in the process.

Until cloud computing came along, ensuring the right amount of resources at the right time was a black art. Now it is a science. Hybrid clouds allow you to own the base and rent the peaks, providing an optimum model in favour of cost management and agility while balancing risk.

This is because the core value of cloud computing allows dynamic right-sizing of IT solutions to support changing business needs, and cloud services should enable automation of these flexible resources by exposing hooks, called APIs, for software driven orchestration to ensure that the cloud resources can be operated efficiently.

The much celebrated low cost and agility of the cloud doesn’t come from cheaper technology, rather cloud is the new IT operations model that yields these benefits. And this new cloud operations model unlocks new and improved business models, such as flash mob e-commerce, viral marketing, and rapidly iterative SaaS service delivery.

So embrace being wrong. Plan on being wrong. Use cloud services like cloud.ca and Amazon Web Services to lease the base and rent the peaks and demand nothing less. For help with your cloud strategy contact us at CloudOps.