Do I Really Want One of Those?

When I was a kid I idolised another lad, he was so very cool. He could do that there robot dancing that was so very popular in the 80?s. He was called by his 2nd name rather than his Christian name (something I used for my own sprogs) and he had a Big Trak.

Big Trak has gotten popular again and I’ve been dropping hints like crazy to anyone that’ll listen about it but really… do I really want one? I don’t have enough space, I’d play with it rarely if at all after the initial excitement (something my Ma would call a three minute wonder) and it’d eat batteries like there’s no tomorrow!

What this has to do with Cloud computing is tenuous until I recall the feelings I had around that Big Trak I started to have distinct feelings of avarice. These must have continued for a fair old while but have waned over the years. This waning isn’t shared by some though and I was minded of this when I saw this quote from Charles Newhouse (head of strategy and design, enterprise IT systems at BAE Systems) in an article on publicTECHNOLOGY.NET:

He said that there were three things that were important – how many people you’ve got, how much money you’ve got and how much stuff you’ve got. And he told me that I wanted to take away his people and his stuff and with a lot of what he’d spend he would now effectively be buying a service.

He was quoting someone else’s opinion of his own consideration of moving to the Cloud. The person he quoted also thought that following a Cloud Strategy was equivalent to emasculating oneself (Ouch, made me cross my legs that did).

I can’t agree!

Rather than losing something (be it people, money or stuff) I think that adopting a cloud strategy is actually freeing… freeing in the Buddhist way of less-is-more, simplicity and clarity and what-have you.

Rather than lose you – in a one-hand-clapping sort of way – let me explain: As someone responsible for ITC provision in Local Government I’d be ever so pleased to say that I could provide the same or a better service for less.

This would allow the powers-that-be to spend more of a decreasing pot on other essential services. I’d be happy to know that the savings I was making would help to ensure that redundancies weren’t as likely to occur amongst other staff. I’d also be ever so pleased not to have the headache of maintaining all that stuff! Losing my own people wouldn’t be so cool but I don’t think that that’d happen in any case. They’re role would certainly change but the requirement of support and training would still be there. I would, however, lose the requirement for external contractors to come in and fix the dodgy RAID on the main server…