Glue Conference: How the cloud is changing IT

BROOMFIELD, Colo.—The cloud is changing IT inside out as traditional thinking no longer works in a cloud environment, Paul Goth of Cloudscaping told yesterday’s audience at the Glue Conference here.
In the old IT environment, IT people performed immediate actions that were triggerered by performance monitoring. IT departments could activate standby capacity, turn off features and throttle demand, depending on capacity needs. Longer term, IT departments could deploy new infrastructure or remove unneeded infrastructure, but these were not changes made in the heat of the moment. In traditional IT, these changes were expensive, required long lead times, were decisions that couldn’t be reversed, were done in large amounts to get lower pricing and came out of capital expense budgets.
The cloud reverses all of that logic, Goth said. Now capacity decisions can be made quickly, they can be reversed so decisions can be made agilely, pricing is the same in small batches as it is in larger ones, and costs come from the operating expense budget.
While this sounds like paradise, there are still challenges. “Adding capacity is cheap, but it’s not free.” Likewise, even automated processes need to be monitored. And as for metrics, monitor what is important to your customers, not everything that you can just because you can, Goth noted. “Too much data is worse than no data because if you have no data, you know you cannot make a good decision based on data.”