Any implementation of cloud services for the enterprise must strike a balance between rapidly implementing a solution and a solution of increasing complexity and cost.
I like Sreedhar’s observation that the established enterprise would need to leverage cloud IT services differently than a larger enterprise. I do agree that there is probably a well-defined set of startup services that can shorten the time necessary to both establish an development environment and get useful functionality out of the other end.

I think that the assertion that cloud will result in a reduction of complexity is arguable.

To summarize, Sreedhar’s observations are that:

As cloud has become mainstream, people tend to focus only on savings aspect and time to market. They’re indisputable, one of the compelling arguments for cloud. One aspect that gets missed is complexity: If you had hundreds of millions of dollars, you could go buy all the infrastructure you need for all the computing requirements you have. But with the cloud, whether it’s email or data storage or all the deeper needs of an enterprise, the redundancies that formerly concerned us become much simpler. The reduction in cost is a function of a reduction in complexity of technology needs, and there are even more benefits to cloud adoption when you look at it this way.

It’s my experience that the infrastructure extensions that are required to connect to cloud services securely are not trivial to establish and monitor. The other aspect is visibility into the operation and performance of cloud services. Even though your own private infrastructure is complex, you have total control over its monitoring, security and operation. With a public cloud service you do not.

Furthermore, while the overall architecture may be simpler, you are ceding control over your enterprise architecture, data and application interoperability to a third party the farther up the stack you go. That is not a reason to avoid using consumer-oriented cloud IT services, but cloud will not be simpler for everyone.

Finally, without a good management and visibility solution that integrates both private and cloud IT service monitoring and provisioning, cloud services can quickly grow out of hand as each business unit adopts their own favorite cloud service — leaving the CIO to have to stitch the disparate CRM systems together somehow. Therefore, standards and IT strategy are essential to shape and guide the direction that cloud IT goes in so that interoperability and cost-effectiveness can be coupled with the increased elasticity and agility afforded by the cloud.

Our Cloud Adoption Assessment is a good start in this direction and asks the questions that lead to a roadmap for IT transformation and migration to the cloud.

Sreedhar Kajeepetea is Chief Technical Advisor of PaaS and SaaS for CSC Cloud Computing. Follow him on Twitter @sreedhar_k.

Randy Arthur is Director of IaaS for CSC Cloud Computing. Follow him on Twitter @randydarthur.