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Has the Cloud Killed IT? Part 1.

Posted by QuoteColo on April 17, 2014 - Updated on April 14, 2014

has the cloud killed it

Has the Cloud Killed IT? Part 1.

Yesterday, while talking to a client of Quotecolo, I had an interesting conversation on the nature of the information technology industry and how the Cloud has impacted it. While the conversation agreed on the Cloud being nothing more than a marketing term for remote servers providing on demand services, we began wondering if the term “the Cloud” has had a negative impact on the industry as a whole.

It must be reinforced, for everyone in the information technology industry, the Cloud is nothing more than a marketing term to spruce up and replace, “grid computing”. The idea of using remote servers housed in a far off data center to bring instant data (the Cloud) has been in use for a few years now. The idea didn’t come about with the term and the term didn’t spring into action when localized data was replaced by remote server data. Information technology insiders and workers understand the boom as nothing more than a marketing ploy designed to drive dollars and product. Now, overall, most people in the industry are fine with this.

Most people in the industry, be they in colocation, managed hosting platforms, Big Data or the Internet of Things, have come to an understanding that Cloud Computing and data centers will be the infrastructure the IT world is built on for the next ten years. IT professionals understand that and have come to terms with it (more on this in a bit). This said, every IT professional I talk to has serious concerns about what the term “Cloud Computing” is doing to the industry from the outside looking in.

A Primer

We have said this before and we will say this again, if you currently work outside of the information technology industry, the Cloud means everything and nothing to you. More often than not, studies, polls and interviews show the overuse of the term “Cloud Computing” has, no pun intended, clouded the perception of the technology so bad that most consumers now apply it to anything and everything IT related. Due to oversaturation, from the consumer point of view, the term now applies to anything and everything IT.

This is a major issue.

Why Matters

If you work in sales in the IT industry on the web hosting or mobile side, it is common place for you to talk with clients who clearly have no idea what they are being sold however they think they know they need it because it your service falls under the guise of the Cloud.

The major issue in play here is understanding the solutions consumers are purchasing. One of the main problems with clients and consumers purchasing IT services on the grounds that they are considered part of the Cloud is that those consumers truly have no idea what they are buying. Currently in IT sales, throwing the term “Cloud Computing” out is akin to someone laying down their debit card and saying “yes, charge me anything” without fully understanding the technology they are purchasing.

Unfortunately, the majority of consumers bow to a term instead of understanding the why – the pain points which the technology answers. The why of a sale matters, especially so when the why of that sale is meant to address major concerns and problems with a corporations IT infrastructure.

The problem isn’t isolated to clients though. In our follow up post, we are going to chat about the growing issue of Cloud confusion from the IT professional point of view – more specifically sales and marketing.

Categories: Cloud

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