Off to the cloud

You don't need to own your own infrastructures to support your IT needs. You don't need to take the headache of maintaining your infrastructure. You don't need to spend on capital expenditure. You don't need to be worried about your operational costs for your data centers and IT staff. Think about power failures and backups. Its as easy as getting any other utility service. Electricity or Water. Just get it connected and pay as you use. That is the future of computing.

Today in Maldives too we spend so much on IT. Buying expensive servers, firewalls, routers, etc. Changing PC's every other year. This is a big business. The finance guy takes a cut, the IT guy takes a cut, the vendors make millions. Its good business. This applies to many nations not just Maldives. The IT managers loves to collect servers and other toys to play with. Not even 5% of the servers in Maldives will utilize even 20% of the CPU. This is all normal. This is very common in the government too. Every ministry has its own data center / server room. Its own IT people, etc. We replicate the same data in multiple ministries. We just take quotes from the hardware vendors and let them dictate our infrastructures. Its again all good business. Everyone is happy this way?. Yet we have send millions (of USD) on e-government project mainly the network. Which we use to access a Microsoft SharePoint server. Which is again good. Took us a few years to get this up and running, but it's there. We should be happy. Again 2011 we'd spend a few millions on IT hardware. A few of the MDP members are hardware vendors; need to keep them happy. Some of the DRP members too, they would shout , need to keep them happy too. This is business as usual.

If someone would propose a solution, you can always say IT guys are lazy they just talk and we move on with business as usual. Things like moving to open source is bad, cos there is no vendor behind it who will charge millions. We need someone to be accountable. Even if there is open source service providers they don't charge as much as Oracle and Microsoft. So that is important. Anyway we don't need all that, all we do is word process, facebook and maybe do some spreadsheets. We have enough civil service staff so we don't need automation. That will leave a lot of employees with no work at all. Of course we should talk BIG about plans for IT and automation from cabinet meetings to press releases. That is part of the show.

We will spend a few millions training our people in IT. They will come and install Windows and clean virus for us. That is a hard job. Research and Development is just for the west, we are Maldivians. We only worry about the environment and our beaches. So yes, we live in the cloud. We are happy people. Why should we worry about cost cutting and things like centralized data centers, etc. We have better stuff to worry about like the drama that goes in the Majlis and the "bandaru/falhu konun" projects for islands with 200 people. So many other important things. I hope that explains it all for those who complain on the topic. We can say and write a lot more but would be a waste of time; already is by posting this.