By now it should be pretty clear the future is in the cloud and moving workloads to the cloud are now commonplace. However all companies, including mine, still have significant investments and relationships with our existing infrastructures providers. Minor projects are often conducted and executed with the mindset of easier to stay with the "devil you know than the devil you don't". This is great until the devil you know makes its incredibly hard and expensive to carry on doing business with them.
We use a rather large infrastructure provider who runs a Tier 1 datacentre in South Africa. We are a small company and don't spend a huge amount with them, but their service levels are nothing short of shocking.
We often want to make a quick DNS record change which involves logging a support ticket with this provider and then waiting about 24 -30 hours for the support engineer to do it. We need to get 1.5 TB NAS for a weekend upgrade and we have to meet with a solutions architect and get told the best they can do is a 6 month contract and it would be $400 a month. We want to join our Azure VNET to our existing network. They said it would take 6 months as the firmware on their firewall was out of date and its a 6 months process to upgrade it.
I could tell many more stories like the above and so could my friends in the industry. The traditional hosting providers are not adapting to the new world. In the new world I can create any component or compute resource within 10 minutes, use it an then destroy it and only pay for what I use. I can make configuration changes via a web-based UI and within 5 minutes its been applied. No waiting for people to do it, no meetings with solution architects and no waiting 6 months for firmware to be upgraded. I have the power and I can do it now.
It seems like the current providers are very much stuck in their old ways and have the mindset that the existing clients will think its too much of an effort to move. Within our company we have a phrase that gets thrown around after every infrastructure move to the cloud we make: "One more step away from
We cannot wait to get everything running in the cloud. Its shiny, its new and it doesn't require us to wait 2 weeks for a server upgrade. It's becoming an easy sell to management and clients. Time is money and in this fast paced world it should happen now and not after 2 meetings and 4 weeks. Cloud offers that and traditional hosting companies don't.