For tech companies, “cool tech” is the term used to describe the technologies that really matter. The ones that can really shift the world and disrupt the global marketplace. And there is also the term “undifferentiated IT service”, which are the technologies considered to be the more trivial components. The things that are the same from one company to the next, like email and file servers.
If you are a new startup, you don’t want to spend money on things that aren’t going to gain you momentum in the tech world. Forbes tell us, “if you’re a hot startup, you’re trying to build a culture of “we’re all in this together”, and you want to value everyone equally. Except you’ve got this problem, because if you have in-house IT infrastructure, you now have all these people that you’re not valuing the same, because… well, frankly, elitism.” It can become an issue if you have a network admin messing with an employee’s laptop to keep it conformant with the best IT practices, you could risk an annoyed employee leaving for another startup.
This will force you to quickly realize that your company will not succeed with “undifferentiated IT service”. It just creates bad blood between the employees trying to provide the company’s IT needs and those trying to get the company to the top of the industry. Not a great situation to be in.
Companies that do not have the core business of IT, but are totally dependent on IT are the ones where “tech” is not computer, network or IT related. These companies can be tech or non-tech and handle IT differently. Every year the demands are growing and also, the budget and power of the IT team.
IT keeps growing and growing over time. Movements from mainframes to PCs and from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, and with these changes came IT growth. Now mix in today’s risks of cyber-attacks and malware infections. According to Forbes there’s empire building going on in IT-land. When it comes budget-time, you don’t want to be the department that gets cuts, you want to be the department that grows. It’s sold on the basis of “controlling our destiny”, meaning that my guys running my servers in my datacenter are somehow better than using public cloud infrastructure at 10% of the total cost to own.
Most commonly it is directed by fear. It is human nature to fear the loss of control, for example to fear being fired because you didn’t have control over everything. However, this is not the main reason that companies won’t make the jump to the cloud. Moving to the cloud is seen as a huge disruption.
To move to the cloud means completely cutting the in-house data center and hiring a CIO who can manage the new paradigm. This can be done in almost all companies. The issue that arises hear, is the hiring managers fear that the CIO won’t be able to manage the shift and they will both lose their jobs. People forget that taking risks is a crucial element of a startup. Fortune says, companies shouldn’t overthink any cloud move, but just do it.
