amazon

Hypothetical situation. You're an IT executive. You're tasked to add a bunch of functionality to the internal systems. A sales rep comes in and shows some of your bosses how you can save a zillion $$ by moving the data to the cloud. You look over the numbers and find out that they’re basically right.

Now what do you do? You generally don’t get into the executive position if you’re not a bit self-focused. Here’s the problem. If you push your data to cloud, it’s reasonably safe, relatively stable and pretty cheap. But the people who maintain it don’t report to you. That means your org chart shrinks and you lose control over your budget and infrastructure. It means you can’t pull resources away from the most important work in order to focus on your pet project. In short, it means you lose power and position. Think of it. If all the functionality in the company moved into the cloud, you’d be out of a job. Or even if not, you can kiss your bonuses good bye. Who’s going to give you a raise from something your vendor did? Of course, if they fail, you’ll hear about it loudly.

So, this week Amazon’s cloud crashed. In truth, it just proves they’re human. I like to collect those stories so that when the bosses demand perfection, I can tell them that if they give me as much money as the folks at Amazon gets, I may have a shot at making it well, but even then, it won’t be perfect.

From a cloud perspective, the Amazon crash hurts. The mythical VP above doesn’t want to move anything to the cloud anyway. Now he has an excuse.

Will be interesting to see what the fallout is…
--kevin