I was going to call this post “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it use the cloud” but I thought better of it.

Any techie reading this would instantly think I am knocking the cloud but they would be completely wrong. What I am attempting to say is that cloud should be the norm and those dirty things call physical servers are the exception. The user community has accepted the cloud but IT departments and particularly university ones just don’t want to play ball. All I ever hear is :

• We know better
• Physical is cheaper
• At least we can touch the server to get it started again
• The cloud is always down – They have great memories when it come to other peoples servers are down
• We can’t see whats happening
• They keep upgrading and don’t tell us

The trouble is, our customers are saying exactly the same things about the legacy IT departments.

Wether its Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Software as a Service (SaaS) its always going to be more reliable, more resilient, more secure and changing as fast as the user demand. Where else could you create an almost unlimited server farm with a click of a few buttons.

I recently read a presentation from Mark Evans – Head IT at Rider Levett Bucknall who, whilst his anecdotes are not quite right said “Zero Infrastructure”. I think he’s right, but how do I convince everyone else…..

Its going to be a log slow battle…..wait a minute, no it isn’t. Tomorrow Im going to accelerate, Scotty, Warp factor 9.