The Pros and Cons of As-A-Service

Recently I have been working with a cloud vendor to move an offering from on premise to the cloud. Here I’m intentionally leaving the details out because I want to focus on the difference in the model of As-A-Service. In many ways, it is better, there are aspects that you do not need to concern yourself with anymore. That’s the deal, to badly quote Madmen “that’s what the money’s for”, but as with all things there are draw backs that are not apparent until after you are well on your way into migrating over to the service. The vendor is so focused on delivering a service that they get too close to it and forget about the operational concerns of the customers. When you own a service on premise the business gets accustomed to the control and when moved to the cloud/vendor provider full control is gone. Whether they are happy with the trade-off is going to depend on specifics, but it really can be frustrating when the operating model you relied on become impossible in the cloud. I know, I know, but there is all the other stuff that I don’t have to do now and that is true, but it could be easier. I know it would be easier if the vendor tried to consume their own products more often. I think I read a few years ago, that it was when Microsoft started running global fleets of Exchange servers themselves for O365, that they finally sorted out certificate management. The lesson here is that you need to take more of a customer point of view to your product. This is key in the move to products away from functional teams, and hopefully it will get better. I get it that sometimes you need to change how your customer consumes your product and if you are offering a better way than that is one thing, but if you are not and have missed that consumer of your platform/product will still need to alert and manage their workloads then you’ve missed something obvious in my opinion.

Thanks for reading. Conor

Written on February 7, 2019

[ Thinking-Out-Loud  Rant  ]