Good CIOs don't blame vendors for their problems. After all, they're the ones who validate the technology, build the larger plan, and understand the market forces. When failures occur, these CIOs look at their own organizations.
Cloud computing brought to light a lot more technologies for IT to complain about. In some cases, CIOs now in production with cloud platforms are finding that their expectations aren't being met.
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Indeed, a recent CIO Australia article reports on discussions at a panel of government CIOs at a recent cloud conference. The reporter discovered that "everyone's talking about cloud computing, but some government CIOs are still not convinced, arguing that the market is still immature -- with one saying that some vendors are simply 'repackaging' outsourcing services."
Earth to CIOs: Most cloud providers are, indeed, "repackaging" and outsourcing services. Why? Because they wanted to get in the cloud market as soon as they could, so they pushed their stuff to an as-a-service model, without changing much of the offering. Typically, most are missing multitenant capabilities, security services, governance, and management. Guess what? Those are not cloud products, even if they have big enterprise brand names.
Still, it's not the cloud providers' fault that they are offering such poorly defined and designed services. It's your fault for not testing and understanding those cloud offerings before you deployed that cloud. Although this effort is hard, costly, and no fun, you have to dial that work into the process of moving to the cloud.
The cloud market today is actually pretty mature, especially when you work with the brand-name cloud providers. However, you can get into trouble when you go to providers, particularly in the government market, that have made minor changes to existing products to provide a cloud offering. If you select those products, there are major limitations you have to discover ahead of time.
So, CIOs, if you're not doing your homework, stop complaining. It's on you to ask the questions and test the technology. If you don't buy it, the vendors won't sell it for long.
This article, "Blame a bad cloud deployment on the CIO, not the provider," originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of David Linthicum's Cloud Computing blog and track the latest developments in cloud computing at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.