Connecting to AWS and Azure is tricky and requires new skills, says local authority IT chief
New skills can cost a fortune, and getting the right bandwidth set-up can cause difficulties, says Rocco Labellarte
The biggest obstacles in using popular public cloud products Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are in connecting the services to the organisation, and the need for new skills, according to the head of technology and change delivery at the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, Rocco Labellarte.
"When you talk to Amazon and Microsoft and any providers of public cloud services, their solutions work out of the box fantastically; the problem is connecting them to us, so we have found enormous difficulty when we originally set up the infrastructure to get the right bandwidth at the right cost, between the hosted data centre and our location," Labellarte explained to delegates at Computing's Data Centre Summit 2015 in London last week.
He said that the second factor that the local authority has had to consider is the differences in skillsets that are required.
"The skillset definitely changes, the whole design and architecture component [is different]; maintaining that design with a moving environment when security is constantly on the up. You need those skills and if you don't have them in-house it costs you a fortune. If you have them in-house, you're constantly fighting to ensure you keep those people within your organisation," Labellarte explained.
But while a delegate questioned whether the IT suppliers were using the lack of knowledge within IT teams to their advantage, Janet Day, former head of IT at Berwin Leighton Paisner LLP, defended technology vendors, and suggested that end users should learn to cope with all new technologies - including cloud computing.
"You make the point of suppliers trying to put one over on the hapless IT team who now don't have the skillset perhaps to work these things out. But nobody is in business to be altruistic, or at least very rarely are, so you have to expect them to want to make a profit, and you also have to expect every in-house IT team, no matter what the composition, to want to try to do the best for whom they work," she said.
Day said she took issue with the idea that new skills could not be acquired by IT teams.
"We've all had to learn new skills continually. The technology hasn't stood still, what the technology can enable the business to do hasn't stood still, and therefore [the skills] of the teams that we manage has had to change over time," she said.
"You are forced to stay up to date in this industry, and I think people working in tech are generally good at that; the obstacle to them learning new things is the fear that other people around them won't understand the transition they have to go through, and therefore they may try to go back to what they were doing before," she added.
Computing and QA have partnered to launch their cloud computing training campaign, which aims to raise awareness of cloud computing and explore how companies can gain the maximum business benefits.