Did the cloud wipe out IT departments?

Cloud computing.

The irony that IT departments really were the last to know, or understand the growth of cloud computing, despite them actually accelerating the growth due to restrictive practices

It’s now widely accepted that IT departments, programmers and draconian infrastructure policies actually drove real users into adopting cloud-based services.

IT, sadly, made it a battle and mostly took a futile “last stand” approach. They lost. It’s probably the last straw for most organisations as they realise that IT departments are places of legacy and protectionism – they are not the bastions of innovation and trend leaders.

Of course, this has been happening for years. What’s scary is just how completely final the shift away from traditional IT departments has become.

It’s widely reported that IT departments underreport cloud-service usage by a factor of about 10. That’s 9 out of 10 cloud services used blind to IT. Wow!

So, did cloud kill IT?

No. IT killed IT by ignoring business needs and enforcing draconian frameworks that were only accessible to the elite in IT themselves. They’ve “Darwinned” themselves out of existence.

Problems? There will be plenty, IT did bring some benefits of tightly managed and controlled services. But the public cloud will fix them, it’s an open market and the barrier to move from service to service is markedly lower than in the old IT world.