I glanced through an interesting read last week of a CIO who refused to address an IT issue for a business manager because the issue involved cloud services. What makes the story interesting is that the manager had decided to bypass IT by using public cloud services without authorization. While perception of this manager’s actions within his organization may range from heroic to questionable, it is fair to assume there was some justification why this user circumvented standard IT process.
In many instances, the justification of an act like this is straightforward: increased speed and reduced cost of IT deployments. What happens when a project surfaces that requires a few Terabytes of storage immediately and can’t wait a week for a provisioning request to be fulfilled or an expensive hardware PO to get approved? What happens when users are fed up with the speed of tape restores and instead take matters into their own hands and back up their data to the cloud — using their own security or none at all? Both cases represent situations most businesses would rather avoid, but with the prevalence of on-demand cloud-based IT, it is often nearly impossible for internal IT organizations to match the agility and flexibility enabled by the cloud that is readily available externally.
Preventing Cloud Chaos
How do we prevent potential “cloud chaos” in IT environments? One apparent solution would be tighter lockdowns to disallow users from accessing the cloud at all. A better solution would be to standardize on a set of practices for using the cloud that provides a supplement to in-house IT and is secure and compliant without putting an organization at risk.
In the case of storage, a good solution is to allow users to harness the elasticity and agility of cloud storage, through secure and standardized interfaces. While cloud storage is not always a replacement for on-premise storage, it can easily satisfy the need for rapid, incremental capacity expansion that sometimes cannot be fulfilled using internal IT resources. It can also address use cases that require bursts in storage capacity, such as test, development, business analytics or other tasks that run infrequently enough that they do not justify dedicated resources.
With cloud SAN and data protection products like CloudArray, you can easily create standardized policies around how cloud storage is consumed. These policies include encryption, preferred providers, availability and cost metrics. You can create thin-provisioned and secure data volumes, each up to 384TB, for immediate use by applications on a pay-as-you-go basis. Once these volumes are no longer needed, they can be deleted. Because these data volumes look and feel like a local SAN storage, they are also simple and familiar to manage. Internal IT and cloud storage can now co-exist seamlessly, giving users the best of all worlds.
Beware of the outlaws
Perhaps this is not last time you’ll hear about “cloud outlaws” bypassing internal IT. Whether you view this as a present threat, future concern or unlikely event, you can prevent this from happening by adopting cloud services in a standardized framework that IT can administer and manage; in the process, you can also substantially enhance the capabilities and agility of your IT department.
Does standardizing cloud storage make sense for your organization?
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