Cloud Oxymoron: 91% IT decision makers like the cloud, yet 43% business users skip central IT

Rackspace has a press release on its survey that finds nine in ten IT decision makers support the cloud.

Rackspace Hosting Reports Nine in Ten IT Decision Makers in National Survey Have Positive View of Cloud Computing

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Overwhelming Majority of Decision Makers Believe Customer Service and Technical Support

Are Important Considerations When Choosing Cloud Provider

San Antonio, TX, June 25, 2012 – Nine in ten (91%) of IT decision makers have a positive opinion of cloud computing according to a national survey commissioned by Rackspace Hosting.  IT decision makers view customer service and technical support as important considerations when choosing a cloud computing provider.

But, when I read the press release an Oxymoron comes out.

An oxymoron (plural oxymorons or oxymora) (from Greek ὀξύμωρον, "sharp dull") is a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms. Oxymorons appear in a variety of contexts, including inadvertent errors such as ground pilot and literary oxymorons crafted to reveal a paradox.

The contradictory idea is the same people who filled out the survey have a wide number of users that bypass the corporate IT group for cloud services.

Rogue IT is Prevalent

Nearly half (43%) of decision makers surveyed 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 work projects.   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.

Now you can explain this many different ways.  Let me give you simple way to look at this.  Corporate IT is a huge group with lots of lots of employees.  The Cloud is a threat to their jobs.  So, whenever a cloud project is brought into corporate IT, a lot of what goes on are attempts to educate the users that they should be using corporate IT staff to run their cloud projects.  This delays the project and increase the costs.  

Wouldn't it be amazing if corporate IT said we can execute cloud projects faster and cheaper than you can on your own.  Shouldn't this be true if corporate IT really had Cloud skills?

What the cloud is doing is giving business users a freedom of choice.  The past corporate IT was a monopoly.

“Cloud computing is spurring innovation by enabling business users and developers to deploy, configure and adapt faster,” said John Engates, chief technology officer at Rackspace.  “The survey confirms the rapid migration to the cloud as IT leaders reap the benefit of spending more time creating and less time configuring.”

The harsh reality of the cloud is it eliminates jobs in corporate IT.  If it doesn't eliminate jobs how do you expect to save money?  Rackspace, Softlayer, and Amazon Web Services would go broke if they had the manpower overhead of corporate IT.

The evil part of The Cloud is it is threat to the large mass of people in IT.  Amazon, Facebook, Google, and others are proud they have one sys admin taking care of up to 10,000 servers.