Cloud Adoption Is Slowed by People as Much as Technology
People issues can hinder a company’s move to the cloud just as much as technological hurdles, three finance and asset-management technologists said at an industry event Tuesday.
Cultural challenges can emerge when a company makes the shift to cloud-based applications and processes. Finding and cultivating the right technology talent can lead a company to look beyond their own IT teams, and a lack of clarity around what the shift means for a company can lead to misunderstandings.
Luigi Mercone, managing director at Bank of New York Mellon Corp., warned against wishful thinking regarding the capabilities of the cloud or any other technology.
“There is a lot of chasing the shiny object,” he said during the panel discussion, hosted by enterprise-technology venture-capital fund Work-Bench.
Business executives’ unrealistic expectations of the cloud can contribute to unnecessary strain for technologists, said Bill Murphy, chief technology officer at private-equity firm Blackstone Group LP.
“They hear ’cloud,’ they hear Amazon is going to run it for one penny a terabyte or whatever the hell it is today and can we have that by next quarter,” he said.
By moving to the cloud, companies are outsourcing their computing needs. Cloud infrastructure services such as Amazon.com Inc. ’s Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Corp. ’s Azure use their own data centers to provide companies with the raw computing components that have traditionally been run in-house.
Information-technology departments need to resist the pressure to chalk up short-term gains and convince the business that moving to the cloud is a journey, not flipping a switch, Mr. Murphy said.
“You need to convince them to overinvest for a period of time,” he said.
People issues related to cloud adoption also can affect the IT team itself, starting with finding talent. Identifying cloud-capable talent inside and outside the organization can be challenging.
“It’s no surprise to anyone that hiring in technology is really hard right now,” Mr. Murphy said.
