Doing it yourself has many attractions, especially for the new home owner who has time to burn and can afford to experiment a little bit with odds and ends around the house, and in the process, save himself a buck and not need the professional come in and do it for him in a fraction of the time.
DIY certainly has its place.
In the realm of cloud computing, self-service is described as an essential characteristic, and without self-service and the ability to provision services without assistance, an offering cannot be termed cloud computing. So says NIST, the National Institute of Standards & Technology in the United States. (http://www.nist.gov/itl/cloud/)
But, do you in this circumstance, you necessarily want to do it yourself? Or is a partially managed approach better. The risk will always be there that without proper training and experience, you will get half the job done to standard, and the other half sufficiently enough to get you by, but eventually the sufficiency will not be enough and then you are getting by at "just-enough".
A partnered, managed approach that exposes many elements of the offering for self-service provides the best of both worlds. The professional with experience is taking care of the facets that could easily be done wrongly, and provide day-to-day administrative provisioning services via a self-service vehicle. As the customer, you get the benefit of being able to expediently create on-demand, but you have the benefit of the tricky bits and pieces being addressed for you.
Speaking with many adopters of cloud technology recently, it has become evident to me that for most, having self-service was exciting and somewhat entertaining in the beginning. That, however, wore off soon enough and now they would prefer that someone did even those tasks that could be done via self-service, effectively taking the customer back to the fully managed days. The bit about cloud they are finding attractive is mainly the on-demand elasticity and the consolidation of backend components and the metered approach - not so much the self-service.
Share
Editorial contacts