A recent Gartner Inc. report predicts that while it’s a trend to outsource IT operations to third party providers, large organizations will start building their own private corporate clouds. It will be just like outsourcing to a cloud provider like Google or Amazon, the report says, except the corporate cloud will be a private infrastructure owned by the organization and tailored to meet the specific needs of that business.
Organizations will be able to model these infrastructures after the services of successful third-party providers, the report said.
It’s not a bad idea that an organization buying IT services from a third-party provider should build its own cloud if it can. That way, the organization will be able to run its business on the same services, except have the benefit of overseeing the infrastructure and operations, and the flexibility to output services as required by the individual needs of different business units.
Most organizations think of the IT outsourcing process as necessitating a third-party service provider, but why not outsource to your own IT department? Certainly, the concept of a corporate cloud is an extension of IT outsourcing except the provider is in-house. The business units could purchase those same IT services from the IT department running the corporate cloud as it would from an external provider.
It’s true that maintaining a corporate cloud would require the kind of IT expertise that perhaps not every IT department would typically have, but if an organization is heavily dependent on those services to run its business, and it is large enough to have economies of scale, then it may be a good strategy to build that infrastructure and staff it with the appropriate expertise in the name of long-term gain.
Service providers like Google and Amazon have proven that IT services can be a successful business with the right infrastructure, expertise and business approach. And, if an organization has the resources and know-how to put all that together in-house, then it’s not a bad idea to do it yourself instead of buying it.