Today's “shadow IT” – in which business users acquire and run their own IT resources as a way to circumvent their IT departments – may eventually become part of tomorrow's corporate IT portfolios. However CIOs and IT managers need to be proactive in broadening their resource base to include new platforms and devices. And, while until recently cloud providers attempted to mimic corporate data centers, now corporate IT seeks to mimic cloud service providers.
I recently had the opportunity to chat with John Engates, chief technology officer at RackSpace, about the new role IT leaders need to play in the new world of cloud computing. He discussed some of the surprises that emerged from RackSpace's latest survey of 500 IT decision makers, particularly the fact that “shadow” or "rogue" IT is now prevalent across many enterprises, large and small.
A fairly sizable chunk, 43%, of respondents say they are aware of people taking it upon themselves to use cloud computing services or resources not provided by their organization’s IT department in order to help with projects. Remember, that consists of respondents “aware” of such situations – suggesting a tip-of-the-iceberg situation in which there may be even more shadow IT taking place even further under the radar.
This could either be viewed as a threat, or a golden opportunity to enterprises, Engates says. "If the IT department is forward thinking and looking ahead, they could be looking at it as a way to tap into the creativity of business units, rather than just telling them to wait. The reason users are going around IT is because they have been told 'no' so many times, they say 'look, we’ve got to get stuff done, were going to go do it ourselves.' "
"If IT embraces cloud computing, and puts it on the menu of services, puts it on the service catalog, then it's not going to be rogue or shadow. It will have the full support of IT," says Engates. "That’s an opportunity for an enterprise to really change the dynamics of how IT gets done. It doesn’t have to be an either/or, it can be a both." The survey finds a great deal of interest in employing both approaches. One in ten (11%) completely host their IT infrastructure off-site and 40% hosts their IT infrastructure both in-house and off-site. Smaller companies are far more likely to be hosting their IT offsite in the cloud – for example, 21% of companies with 21 to 99 employees hosted their IT offsite, versus 9% of companies with 5,000 or more employees. Factor in hybrid arrangements – with both onsite and offsite IT resources being employed – things even out, with 52% of the largest companies employing such strategies.
Such a blended strategy -- employing cloud resources and services from both the enterprise data center and from outside services -- helps elevate the role of IT in the business as well, Engates states. "It allows IT to focus on the things that do require either more complexity, or have very specific requirements that need customization or need a lot of hand holding. It also allows for the quick deployment of short-term applications that need to get done one or another. Users can go to any number of cloud-type of offerings, and be done without a lot of risk, and a lot of intervention by the IT department."
Among respondents reporting someone in their organization using cloud services independently of the IT department, 38% said the main reason is to save time. One in three respondents believe it was because the solutions were not available internally or because it was a way to not deal with the organization’s IT department.
Again, not a threat to IT -- in fact, the survey finds cloud computing has been a growth engine for many IT departments. While 50% of respondents report little or no impact as a result of cloud, another 26% say the sizes of their IT departments have actually increased. Within the larger companies (with more than 5,000 employees), there has been even more growth – 31% of these respondents report IT growth, versus only 20% indicating the reduction in force.
"I think the role of the IT manager and IT leadership of the organization is less of being responsible for building or designing technology from the ground up, and more in the business of assemblage technology, and they have been for quite a few years," says Engates. "It's very rare to meet a CIO who builds everything in-house. They're really pulling together capabilities from a lot of different sources. IT is now in the position of being the guide or the sheppard to help the internal users, the business units figure out what clouds to use, and how they should use them, and how they should integrate them with other applications within the enterprise, and which ones are high risk or low risk."
Engates also points to a recent shift in the market that points to the increasing role cloud is playing it enterprise IT management. He observes that for years, RackSpace worked to model itself along the lines of corporate data centers and IT departments. "Now, what we're hearing a lot is IT departments want to become more and more like cloud service providers," he says. "They want to embrace the same ideas, the same concepts, the same pricing models and tools and engagement models as the cloud computing vendors. They’re trying to become service providers to their internal constituents. They’re trying to become more agile, more nimble, they’re trying to have more software on demand. they’re starting to publish service catalogs to their own internal groups, and they’re actually trying to use the same software tools."
