Thread by @swardley

This is the sound of a thousand home grown kubernetes or other private clouds for reasons of "security" and protecting critical data such as the executive scores on the last golf round or the new recipe for "Mr Tasty's Cheese and Onion Crisps" going pop ->

https://twitter.com/FT/status/1452727125765730305

X : Alternative headline: "GCHQ bow to the inevitable."
Me : Yes, it was inevitable and it's all three agencies -

https://twitter.com/MattGarrahan/status/1452745973277528066

X : Will there be a reaction?
Me : Do you mean from legacy vendors? Inevitable. Expect lots of lobbying of politicians etc to try and change this. It's going to be hard to continue to spread the FUD of cloud and sell yesterday's tech to corporate laggards if this stands.

X : What are the main obstacles?
Me : To adopting cloud? Well there's the change of practices, re-architecting but that's just mechanics. The real obstacle is inertia caused by past capital expenditure and political captial.
X : Political capital?
Me : Loss of empire etc.

X : They still have years if not decades of inertia to feed of.
Me : Yep. If the average "would be CIO" is late 40s then for some organisations you've probably got a good two decades of inertia to feed off before they retire. Here's a handy table for you, a bit old but ok.

X : 2031 to 2046? For cloud?
Me : Yep. We still have punchcard systems in the wild. Expect some of the laggards to hold out to moving to the cloud for quite some time. Decades beyond the time which cloud is considered the new norm.
X : When is that happening?
Me : Already has.

X : What about the staff?
Me : Lol. In 15 years of being involved in cloud, I can't think of a case where those moving to cloud haven't ended up doing more stuff or needing new skills. You reassign and retrain. The old "you will lose your job" is vendorspeak for "buy our tin".

Me : But yes, you need to give your staff a path to the future. It's 101 stuff but surprising how many people forget this, so it's worth raising. The tricky space is normally the management.
X : Management?
Me : Yep. Loss of political capital i.e. empire, past promises made.

X : Vendorspeak?
Me : Gosh, this graphic is so old I had to go and dig it up. Bit of a fossil like some of the companies still playing these games.

X : Have you seen this? theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/o…
Me : Did I not mention -"Expect lots of lobbying of politicians etc to try and change this" - earlier in the thread?

Me : There will be hordes of lobbyists out there trying to change the decision, not for reasons of interest of citizens / tax payers (though it will be dressed up as this) but purely for reasons of commercial self interest and greed. Did I not mention ...

Me ... the "sound of a thousand home grown kubernetes" going "pop"?
X : Yes
Me : Well, it's more of a fading "brnmm, brmmm, tick, tock, clink, fizz" as those vendor expectations of Aston Martins, Rolexes and Champagne disappear into the night. They won't like it.

Me : So yes, expect oodles and oodles of lobbyng. However, ignoring that ... well done MI5/MI6/GCHQ on making the right moves. You're doing Britain proud. Hopefully the rest of Government will follow suit quick enough.