Hey IT — embrace, don’t stifle, developers’ flight to cloud
October 1, 2012
Shadow IT, or dark ops, can be scary to IT departments, but there are reasons developers go rogue. Instead of fighting their urge to flea to the cloud, make it easy for them to use cloud resources in a responsible way. You’re stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. No one’s moving. It’s hot, the air conditioner is busted and next to you is a tempting escape … a wide-open breakdown lane. Sure, you could move over and jump ahead. You’d get where you wanted to go faster, but you’d be breaking the rules.
Shadow IT projects crop up in much the same way. Gridlocked by the processes and protocols imposed by IT management, developers very often give in to the temptation of moving their projects outside where they can progress faster. These “shadow IT” or “dark ops” which happen when developers go outside the firewall — spinning up and provisioning their work on beyond-the-firewall cloud resources to support time-sensitive project delivery. These efforts typically happen without the knowledge of IT (or accounting) departments…
Dark ops: a symptom of impatience, colliding objectives
Dark ops emerge when dev/devops teams hit communication breakdowns, governance constraints, and resource limitations. The whole rationale for the devops movement — in which company developers and operations people — who often work at cross purposes — are encouraged to work together to build, then deploy, incremental software updates and improvements. It sometimes doesn’t work that way, hence the rogue developer. sometimes that’s because IT management has implied or stated outright that it doesn’t have the time, in-house skills, resources, or desire to deal with their projects. At the same time, developers are under pressure to innovate to keep the enterprise competitive…
Read more from the source @ http://gigaom.com/cloud/hey-it-embrace-dont-stifle-developers-flight-to-cloud/