#cloudchat Recap: IT Sprawl vs Cloud Sprawl

Last week we hosted our second #cloudchat, which examined "IT Sprawl versus Cloud Sprawl." After almost a decade in, we were curious if the cloud was simplifying IT or not, and turned to cloud specialists in the community for answers.

Rackspace cloud experts Kent Kingery and Sandy Thorsen joined other experts, including Intermedia's Nicole Scalese, GovCloud Network’s Kevin Jackson, F5's Lori MacVittie and Cloud Technology Partner's Ed Featherston to discuss and debate how the cloud has impacted IT over the following five questions:

1. 1. How has cloud growth contributed to complexity?
   2. What are some reliable ways to manage cloud sprawl?
   3. What are some of the unintended consequences of cloud proliferation?
   4. Is IT doing enough to manage and control cloud deployments by LOB?
   5. What have been some of the rude awakenings of the cloud era?

In general, the consensus was that the cloud has contributed to making Central IT's job more complex. The group felt that this was by and large due to the fact that infrastructure is at people's fingertips and if IT throws up road blocks, an environment can be quickly spun up.

https://twitter.com/benrothke/status/888066879348191232

Our Microsoft Azure Cloud evangelist, Kent Kingery, felt that change is happening more rapidly than ever before. This means that the people managing your cloud environments must constantly improve their skillset to stay up-to-date on the latest and greatest developments.

https://twitter.com/KentKingery/status/888067695920414722

Nicole Scalese echoed the notion that the cloud no longer allows for the status quo. But said that instead of training and skills, it is Central IT that must adopt new practices and processes.

https://twitter.com/nicolescalese/status/888067496917348353

Regardless, the availability of cloud resources on demand will mean that IT has to have some ways to manage it, but how? The experts said that it is so simple to BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) to work that IT must begin thinking about ways to manage cloud sprawl.

Some of the strategies to manage cloud sprawl included making the time IT takes to provision resources faster, having monitoring solutions to see what is being used and taking time to plan and design solutions. Racker Sandy Thorsen suggested that Central IT can kill shadow IT "by having IT behave as a service provider."

https://twitter.com/SandyThorsen/status/888071006547529728

If you’re curious about some of the other answers we saw in the chat, be sure to explore our Twitter Moment. Our next #cloudchat will happen on Thursday, July 27 at 11:00 a.m. Central, and we’ll be exploring the Cloud Skills Gap. Hope to see you there!

https://twitter.com/i/moments/889486872208179200