When your cloud strategy is ‘it depends’

This past week I spent time with some IT executives at a Fortune 500 company. Despite years of big spending on AWS, the company made a commitment years ago to switch to Microsoft Azure. Today they’re still on AWS… and Azure… and private data centers. Our conversation was yet another reminder of the messy reality of enterprise IT spending. However much we may want to pretend there are absolutes about enterprise IT (“everyone is moving to the cloud”), the foundational principle of enterprise IT strategy always comes down to two words:

It depends.

Much of “it” depends on the people you have. Executive edicts can help provide space for developers to accept the need for change, but they should come with allowance for developers to get the training and other resources to evolve their skill sets to accelerate shifts in IT strategy.

There is no ‘one true way’

In talking with my friends mentioned above, we delved into why they committed to one cloud but still mostly used the other, and why their “all in” decision about the cloud still has them using a lot of private data centers. The company’s commitment to Azure didn’t actually slow their pace of AWS adoption. Partly because of technology: Developers within the company needed the services AWS provided, so even as they invested in Azure for some workloads, they kept spending on AWS for others. Partly because of people: Those same developers were more familiar with AWS services and so they kept building with it.

As for their use of private cloud, some of the rationale is purely a cost calculation. For some workloads, it’s cheaper to run on premises. “The cloud is not cheaper. That’s a myth,” one of the IT execs told me, while acknowledging cost wasn’t their primary reason for embracing cloud anyway. I’ve been noting this for well over a decade. Convenience, not cost, tends to drive cloud spend—and leads to a great deal of cloud sprawl, as Osterman Research has found.

Small wonder that even with AWS hitting a $100 billion annual run rate and seemingly everyone embracing cloud computing, cloud remains relatively small compared to on-premises IT spending. Gartner, for example, expects global IT spending to top $5.26 trillion this year, with public cloud spending accounting for just 12.9% of that ($679 billion). Granted, public cloud spending is growing much faster than the overall IT market (20.4% versus 7.5%), and the long-term trend is toward cloud, but the point is that it’s going to take a long, long time.

Again, this is because IT strategy ultimately comes down to “it depends,” and the crux of that uncertainty is people.

The human factor

I mentioned the people factors that are affecting cloud adoption at the company above. Now play those factors out across millions of organizations, and you get a sense of why so much spending still goes for on-premises IT. I recently wrote about how slowly enterprise IT changes: new programming languages, databases, etc., emerge every month, but only a few stand the test of time and still see adoption over decades. The reason, of course, is people. People cling to what they know, which can be a negative, but it’s also a positive as it helps ensure continuity.

Over the years, I’ve tended to work for insurgent technology companies, not incumbents. I’ve thus been on the side of open source, cloud, NoSQL, and other attempts to help enterprises evolve their IT investments. As such, I’ve learned how crucial it is to focus on people.

Years ago, then AWS CEO (now Amazon CEO) Andy Jassy spoke out against incremental innovation within enterprises, arguing executives needed to “flip the script” and drive “pretty big change or transformation.” That sounds great but runs quickly up against the reality of the people who will actually implement executive orders. I’ve found it exceptionally useful to provide deep technical enablement: hands-on workshops, hackathons (something I wrote about recently), etc. You want developers, architects, and others to feel confident with new technology. You want to turn them into allies, not holdouts. Jassy declared, “Most of the big initial challenges of transforming the cloud are not technical” but rather “about leadership—executive leadership.” That’s only half true.

It’s true that developers thrive when they have executive air cover. This support makes it easier for them to embrace a future they likely already want. But they also need that executive support to include time and resources to learn the technologies and techniques necessary for executing that new direction. If you want your company to embrace new directions faster, whether cloud or AI or whatever it may be, make it safe for them to learn. When you give developers the room they need to personally evolve, your enterprise can evolve with them.