#rightscale

RightScale Inc. has found that 89 percent run applications outside the firewall. For more information on cloud services, visit our website at kevinmccauley.com

Interesting new Survey from Silicon Angle (Maria Deutscher)

A new poll of 1,060 companies from cloud management provider RightScale Inc. has found that 89 percent run applications outside the firewall, more than half of which are hosted on the retail giant’s very own infrastructure-as-a-service platform.

Additionally,

RightScale says that 71 percent of the organizations surveyed in its poll…

We've all heard the talk of Shadow IT, of the most interesting projects being done under the radar with a credit card and some cloud, and of heads of Marketing and/or Sales with bigger IT budgets than the head of IT. In some circles, the central IT capability of a large enterprise was largely written off. Slow, expensive, unresponsive, and far more concerned with protecting turf and keeping the lights on than doing anything even vaguely useful or interesting.

Harsh, mostly unfair, and (except in some edge-case organisations) largely untrue.

A few surveys recently have begun to paint a different picture; one that is more positive about the corporate IT function, if it steps up, and engages strategically with the real needs of the business.

The most recent — public — example is the closing thought from this summary of RightScale's latest State of the Cloud report (free, with registration):

As Cloud Usage Grows, Central IT Becomes a Cloud Broker The 2015 State of the Cloud Survey shows that cloud adoption is growing and most enterprises are leveraging multiple cloud environments that combine both public and private cloud options. As a result, central IT teams are stepping in to offer cloud infrastructure services to their organizations while ensuring governance and control over costs. This shift of cloud adoption from shadow IT to a strategic imperative is a critical step in the move to a cloud-centric future.

Is this a real change on the ground, or are rhetoric and data simply catching up with a reality that's been airbrushed out as unhelpful to the preferred story of the past few years?

AWS vs Google pricing changes again: AWS Reserved Instances are now available for no upfront cost. RightScale has the latest cloud price comparison charts.

Google vs AWS cloud pricing has been competitive in 2014 with Google dropping cloud prices 38 percent to date. See the pricing comparison charts.

RightScale's Hassan Hosseini writes about Google's latest price cut, and shares some of his company's figures on the ongoing march to the bottom on price. Amazon will, of course, follow Google. Will they wait until November, to do it on the big re:Invent stage? Or will they do it sooner, to keep up with the pesky competition? Amazon is used to leading here, and may still be working out how best to compete against a credible field of alternative providers.

Price cuts are good for all of us in the short term. Longer-term they may be less good, if deep-pocketed giants like Microsoft, Amazon and Google squeeze too many competitors out of the market.

But how often, I wonder, does an announcement like this latest one from Google make anyone switch? How many of you, if any, shop around before running a new cloud job? Or do you go with the provider that you know, the provider whose APIs you already understand, the provider whose machine images you recognise?