Are IT departments sabotaging cloud computing solutions?

If they are, it is because they see the dreaded "Outsourcing" scenario rearing its ugly head again. They are not ignorant and are typically not naive, young folks. They survived Outsourcing many years ago and "Hosting" more recently, albeit painfully, and they are wary of new marketing terminology for the same ugly beast.

It is incumbent upon Cloud providers to extol the benefits and what the differences are today. IT folks will listen with an open mind, but will not be fooled. They need to hear about real benefits that will be good for the company, but won't have them joining the ranks of the unemployed.

I do not think IT is hurting the business any more than the business hurts itself with the rush to adopt cloud-computing solutions without understanding the nature of the business or cloud solutions. Going to cloud solutions is an evolution not a revolution. Organizations need, at a minimum, a list of business goals and objectives to measure against their current production. If there are holes in the current solutions, the business needs to create clear requirements for meeting these challenges. Only then should one consider cloud-computing solutions.

In my experience as a presales professional, we lost opportunities because the team wanted to position the latest and greatest – not ready for prime time solutions – when the tried and true solutions were fine for solving the immediate customer challenge. Cloud computing is an evolution – not a revolution. Good IT shops that enable business success will evolve into the cloud solutions that fit. There is no rush to this. I find this entire discussion regarding cloud computing disruptive to business success – too much focus on technology and not enough focus on business requirements. It reminds me of the rush to outsource. Were those savings long term? Or short sighted?

Finally, I think smart integrators drive cloud success. If one creates complete business solutions for companies and removes the standard IT infrastructure and costs, then it becomes a simple choice for a start-up of even an established business looking to reduce costs and improve efficiencies. Otherwise, it becomes the equivalent of buying parts to build an automobile to get to the airport when calling a taxi, asking a friend, or getting the bus solves the problem at a fixed rate with no maintenance responsibilities.

Cloud computing is also not a "one solution to every scenario" proposition. Sabotaging the solution? I wouldn't characterize not immediately seeking a cloud initiative as Sabotaging the situation. It does have some pitfalls along with its benefits.

Often times the IT departments don't set the policies on purchasing. In my case the policies are set by the CFO and the Purchasing Department. To say, then, that the IT department is the one sabotaging the effort would be improperly labeling the situation. The initial cost to implement is usually very high and that causes many requisition requests to fall on deaf ears even with the higher ROI in the long run. Getting past the initial numbers is what is important to some cases.

Execution of cloud technology is different from adopting a utility-based cloud business model. Security issues aside, vendors are pushing, and IT departments are buying cloud technologies vs. executing cloud business models.

Server, storage and virtualization vendors still want IT to buy a box or a license. Traditional service providers who could provide a utility computing environment for their customers have little ability to support usage-based billing and other cloud attributes.

IT departments who want to go to the cloud are finding their best bet is to do so on a workload basis vs. a fullscale exodus from the datacenter. Cloud services around email and CRM are low-hanging fruit, but moving that 20 year-old financial application environment into the cloud is not going to happen any time soon.

I believe IT departments are not sabotaging the cloud , but rather that traditional IT vendors and service providers are biased towards their historical revenue streams that will be ultimately be disrupted as public cloud solutions become increasingly available.

Niche business applications that focus on workflow (like EchoSign for contract signature) or distributed, collaborative services (like Skytap for dev and test) are going to be the short term cloud offerings that can be game-changing for enterprises.

Question is - will IT become more of an aggregator of services and a manager of performance requirements and budget thresholds? Add 10-12 niche applications together across an enterprise and IT becomes a service management organization and not a technology team.

We should not be, our aim is to deliver efficient services to the rest of the business, the day i do myself out of a job is the day i've automated all our IT needs. We just need to learn to walk up the solution food chain with the new offerings. My aspiration is to host all but 1 server within the next year. Leaving only a authentication/print server local.

Many great points above. Through my experience working for an MSP and channel development for MSP's I have found that many IT professionals are eager to put their energies into efforts more important to the organization. Doing so makes them a visable and valuable asset to executive leadership.

Paying a six figure income to rotate tapes, isn't good business!

www.asigra.com/blog/68 Tape is dead. Almost.

It's not sabotage, but many people, including those with IT responsibilities, do not have a clear understanding of what "moving services to the cloud" really means. I wouldn't move any infrastructure if I wasn't sure what would happen to it either.
Cloud service providers have a task there, and they should help their customers with ways to lower the initial implementation costs. In many cases, those are way higher than necessary.

Some IT departments really don’t want to adopt cloud based solutions due to the fear of losing control over data or because of concerns regarding theft of data itself. Such people think cloud lacks in security, though on the contrary, it is highly secure. Some IT people like of Military and other allied organizations do not even want to think of putting highly sensitive data out of their premises. Truly, some vendors are not taking appropriate steps to make their policies and agreements compatible with cloud based solutions. They can and they should do their best to adopt the cloud model. In some cases, it may be said that IT departments are willfully undermining the migration to cloud computing, whereas in most cases ignorance to the benefits of cloud is the main factor that is hindering its adoption.
For more information, see –
http://www.myrealdata.com/cloud-computing.html

Depends on the organization. I've found many mid-level IT departments within larger companies are all about managing perception and job preservation.

If this means holding onto hardware and systems to preserve one's own self importance, then I believe that this certainly will happen. It all depends on the personality and individual insecurities of the decision maker the greater corporate culture with which he / she works.

Those that know they cannot compete in the new marketplace will cling onto what they know best regardless of whether or not it's best for the company.