But... the CLOUD!
Take out offshore and foreign visa workers - and the whole drive to SaaS, Cloud Based, "app as a utility" models is based on being able to ship your application deliverables to the lowest bidder. I'm not bought in yet. The whole idea of lowering TCO by buying into a shared pool of scalable hardware resources and IT staff sounds very good - and for organizations of limited resources and size it may very well be. At some point though, I think it is widely acknowledged that we end up returning to a "private cloud" solution. That model doesn't remove the costs of traditional IT. It obfuscates the physical layer behind a virtual one. I can't scale on the fly to meet demand peaks or to scale back without having those resources in reserve. I still need to have engineers and support to design, deploy monitor and maintain those solutions. The private cloud adds an abstraction layer that *increases* costs. This isn't without benefits. The scalability and reliability are real. The lower costs of ongoing management are real too, if well implemented. But it is hard to quantify and qualify what the actual return is on such an investment. This post obviously touches on a lot of subjects that are on the mind of forward thinking IT workers. I wish I knew the solutions. I'd write a book about it.
