Cloud simplicity

Last time I talked about the reduction of complexity within an organisation and how this leads to more reliable and cheaper systems.  Keeping on premise systems simple is essential to achieving this but the cloud plays very well into this environment as well.

Late last year a significant number (over 20000) of our email users were moved from an out hosted email system to a cloud hosted system.  This left around 6000 people relying on the out hosted system for their email services.  Since that occurred we have experienced a number of issues with the out hosted environment, some relating to the systems themselves and some relating to the interaction of those systems with the enterprise as a whole.  In just one of those incidents I had to live with out email for more than a day.

In all that time there has been no issue with the cloud service, users feel their mail is more available and quicker. Not only that the administration of the Cloud email system has been almost zero.  Users are set up using the same ILM process that configures them within Active directory, and after that they just work.

The cloud vendor is absorbing the complexity that would normally be built into our own systems.  This removes another interaction from the chain and frees people to work on systems that are more important to the business.  It is very important though that focus is maintained upon the business need as it is fully possible to add further complexity through a complex interaction between a number of cloud services.