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In organizations, IT departments have a large role to play in ensuring that office computers are functional and they are able to provide all the necessary tools to users in order to enable them to work effectively. This usually means that organizations have to ensure that licenses and hardware are kept in order. As the organization grows, the licenses must be able to cater for the increase in users. Naturally, if the organization grows beyond a certain range, then the organization must consider volume based licensing or switching to an operating environment which has a substantially lower license footprint or possibly a Linux based environment. A number of organizations have begun to make this change as they move into virtualization and cloud computing. There is a huge trend towards cloud computing as organizations realize the cost benefits of offloading their data and other systems onto private cloud providers. For management, the movement to cloud can be seen as a blessing as private cloud providers are expected to also handle troubleshooting issues and ensure data is available when it is required. There is also the security aspect as organizations usually need to spend a large amount of their annual budgets buying or upgrading their security platforms to harden their network infrastructure. In a perfect environment, the only thing an IT department would really need is the domain controller stored in house with the rest of the services all handled by the private cloud provider. The organization simply needs to fork out for a good pipe to handle the communication between the service provider and the organization. A redundant link is a good idea as well. Why should organizations have to continue bearing the costs of buying servers and increasing their SAN’s or investing in pricey security solutions when service providers now provide the entire package? If you are able to achieve this type of layout with your organization’s infrastructure, you can choose to retire your desktops with terminal based solutions as well. This will further reduce the TCO faced by an organization. I know that there are certain organizations are still doggedly clinging to the notion that corporate information should only be stored inside their organizations servers. Why? Because if they give it to a service provider, there is a risk of data leakage and information being hijacked. The reality is that most organizations actually don’t realize that employees are often the greatest threat to data security. Information is transmitted via email everyday and organizations don’t usually invest heavily into monitoring every action of their staff where data movement is concerned. Some organizations are tolerant enough to allow their IT departments to monitor user activity but this is a very limited tolerance.

Let’s look at the situation from both the cloud provider and the organizations point of view. For IT departments, monitoring every movement of the corporate data is a cumbersome task. IT departments are at a point now when each staff member, regardless of position, is expected to be multi-skilled and handle various issues. So, you sometimes have the system administrator running to a manager to resolve an issue which should normally be handled by the IT helpdesk. A system administrator by default is usually tasked with the role of ensuring system uptime, stability and continuous system improvements. In today’s world, that line is no longer visible and every IT staff is expected to be able to handle any role in the department – including the IT manager or CIO. I have seen cases when even the CIO of an organization has been placed in a situation where he or she has to assist a user with something as trivial as formatting a document in Microsoft Word. Like I said, it is a multi-faceted role. If you have a senior person in your IT department unwilling to share the workload of the entire team, you have a problem. But this article doesn’t focus on crappy IT people you have to work with. Instead, let’s look at the situation. As an IT department with all services hosted in-house, an IT professional can have a rather full day dealing with multiple issues. There are servers to monitor, PABX systems, network issues and end user experiences. (more…)