What inspired this piece is “Complicating the Cloud,” a recent, insightful article by industry guru Jeff Kaplan. Kaplan makes a number of trenchant points, many of them coalescing around the idea that the vendor community has a vested interest in complexity. That meshes with my belief that it really is easy to get into the cloud — if the decision makers don’t allow the vendors to make it difficult.
Here’s what Kaplan has to say: «I have to admit that the cloud industry is doing a great job of making it increasingly difficult for… corporate decision makers to feel confident about making the move,» he writes. «The initial success of the cloud movement has created a series of problems. First, there’s the proliferation of players… some of whom rebrand or ‘cloud-wash’ legacy systems for this new market… [They want to] join the ‘cloud rush,’ [by] adding more solutions to their portfolios…» And these tendencies, as he sees them, have made migration to the cloud needlessly convoluted.