The 3 minute guide for non technical managers on how to tell a shared service from software as a service.
This is a recent little wrinkle that managers face, and it’s because everyone thinks everything is ‘in the cloud’, as if that cures all ills, but as we all know, the cloud is just someone else’s computer.
There is a big difference in different types of ‘cloud’ offerings, most of you who have worked in IT for anytime in the last five decades, will know the concept of sharing a database server with other people, or sharing a Storage Area Network with other department. You have to be a good tenant and learn to share. If you savage the space on the SQL Server, the DBAs will get angry with you, if you behave badly on the SAN then you will be moved, to either a different SAN or your bandwidth will be throttled. This is something everybody understood.
Now with the advent of things like AWS, and Microsoft Azure, the full concept of software as a service has arisen, you cannot actually be a bad tenant on such systems. You can push them as hard as you can possibly manage, and they will just scale up 1, This has made things really very easy, We haven’t had to do capacity management or a lot of the normal historically planning. This has made some people’s jobs much easier and less questions are now ask, so when people want to introduce something that is web based, they will often call it software as a service, but it’s not. It’s just a different form of shared service. what is the top easy way of telling this??
Is there a bill when you use more??
That’s it!!, if people just let you use it without a itemised bill, then it’s a shared service. If people bill you more the more you use it, then it’s software as a service.
Why is this important? because you can BREAK shared services, you can overload them and impact the other tenants, You can get yourself thrown off. You can get yourself into all sorts of trouble over it. You have to be well behaved just like in the old days.
So don’t let anyone fool you, unless you’re getting an extra bill for your extra usage, It is a shared service, you can break it, simple as that. If there’s no money exchanged, then it’s not unlimited. Think back to when the internet suddenly got popular, and Internet Service providers advertised unlimited usage. Everybody that pounded the hell out of it suddenly got caught up by ‘fair usage’. They didn’t want to go back on the fact that they sold you unlimited, but it wasn’t. It had a usage limit. Same is true on these apparent cloud services.
Not all services are created equal.
Disclaimer: As always these posts are not aimed at anyone client or employer and are just my personal observations over a lifetime of dealing with both management and frontline associates.
- and you will get a bill[↩]