The Consumerization of IT has made Cloud and Mobile computing integral technologies that have been entrenched in our daily life.  When managed correctly, the adoption of services delivered over the internet presents lower, predictable costs in maintaining infrastructure, while providing flexible capacity, and adding agility to spin up new resources at the snap of a finger.

We can thank the likes of cloud services providers, such as AWS or Azure, for allowing developers and early-stage investors to engage in a partnership taking place in their data centers to create the tools we utilize today.

This boom in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) took place with little friction. Software can be procured through an email address and credit card to get end-users signed up. These solutions are often accessible from any device, and they continually gain market share over the incumbents due to their ability to solve current use cases better. Think Zoom vs GoToMeeting, the former almost earning the legendary status of having a verb ‘zooming’ named after its usage.

Lest we forget you can have too much of a good thing. This shift to more continuous and mobile computing came with inherent issues with how companies were able to effectively run their IT operations.

The first being that IT talent was always hard to maintain. In most cases, the majority of this department’s day is still spent in break-fix mode, and this ability to develop their ideas elsewhere on their own terms for the first was surely something that was appealing. Instead of fixing programs of the past, they could build the features of the future. Thus, the technical seat at the executive table was beginning to look even more vacant than it had before.

Following this exodus, the issue compounded when the flood of “bring your own devices” came to pass. It does not take a security expert to derive the following: more devices on the network + more online application accessed through distributed servers means an even larger attack surface to maintain. So not only was the number of devices on the company’s network increasing almost exponentially, but now the talented people who were most familiar with managing devices, and the health of your network, are leaving to build something else. In some cases, to compete with you.

Forward thinking organizations who are recognizing this trend are figuring out ways to either retain and repurpose talent or focus on strategic alliances with managed technology companies to make leaps towards digital maturity.

Your technology stack can no longer be looked at as a black hole for expenses, or as a mere utility. The companies who will succeed in the coming decades will be the ones utilizing cloud providers the same way we have used the big three automobile manufacturers to distribute commerce previously. A new delivery mechanism for disruption has been set, the creativity to utilize this shift in computing has only just begun.

The goal moving forward may be to figure out a way to make technical talent feel like they are apart of the decision making (maybe they should have been this whole time) And this goes both ways – IT must find a way to effectively communicate the value their feeds and speeds will create in dollars and cents.

Maybe, there needs to be a change in the mindset of the organization to make technology more of a focal point in business? This doesn’t make it a tech company, this makes it a tech-enabled company. Think Quicken Loans, they are delivering a Mortgage service through a mobile experience, delivered by the cloud. They are not a tech company. And despite Honeywell creating the first node on the ARPANET and their push towards smarter appliances, they are just that. An appliance company that is leveraging next-generation technology to better their offerings.

Written By Keaton Forrest – Regional Channel Executive keaton.forrest@teotech.com

Find out more about the Enhanced Applications of our UC offering