Being able to give them credentials to a machine that's ready to go is pretty huge.
If it takes you 2-3 weeks to onboard ANYONE please realize that your IT processes are complete, unmitigated garbage. Paying Microsoft for some Windows VMs through the nose isn't going to change anything about that.
I think the most extreme example of slow process I saw was an organization where central IT wanted to charge $20k and take two months to quote for a project.
In that kind of environment things like this with opex pricing that can be assigned to a project's budget and fast spin up are a much better option :)
So I can see internal pricing being an issue as well. Internal IT charges for quotes. MSFT just quotes.
This happened at a prior company as well. IBM was routinely hired over our internal team as they were cheaper.
At a prior company, one of the only reasons we adopted anything SaaS was that IT didn't have to know it existed.
I'm a security person. I often work with my customers' central IT. I'm not going to have an opinion or judge you, but consider:
You're giving people nightmares. I've seen it go very wrong (front-page news wrong). And then the threads commenting on "how incompetent can they be, blabla". I've worked with the people stressed, sad and disappointed that they got pwned because of shadow IT. It's a ticking time bomb.
The cloud wont save you from shadow IT's insecurities. In two years, when you switch to another SAAS provider, or the domain changes, and the enterprise app is left in your azure subscription, and the baddies notice... Then you'll call me or someone like me, and I can earn my paycheck :)
In the former case there was high turnover (replace the team in 1.5 years) and in the latter cases there was high turnover coupled with a problem more than a month away not being considered a problem. So in the former knowledge poured out the door and in the latter knowledge poured out the door and nobody had an interest in anything beyond the quarter, so you do what gets you to the next review cycle.
Basically in both cases the bomb does not matter as you either probably won't be there when it goes off or it doesn't matter as you miss your quarterly goal instead.
We need software to do X.
Call IT, they give you software that sort of does part of X, but it's some enterprise garbage where you quit your job if you have to use it.
Call IT and tell them that's not a good solution. We have this other realistic solution instead.
IT, not wanting to be bothered, laughs and hangs up the phone. Sometimes they'll throw in an excuse that everyone knows doesn't make any sense.
The workers that need to do their job pay for an actually working solution out of other funds (or use their personal software).
Things go wrong and they call you. It's the ineffectiveness of IT to help people get their work done that's the source of the problem.
The way I read shadow IT is as the requirements analysis central IT hasn't done. People aren't taking on all of that extra expense because they want two jobs, they're doing it because central IT is making it hard to do their jobs. When security policies conflict with productivity, it has a direct cost from inefficiency but often a greater one by training people to think of central IT as an obstacle to be bypassed rather than an ally. That inevitably causes other problems and takes a considerable amount of work to improve.
Who cares about front-page news wrong lol. Equifax was front-page news wrong, and there were 0 actual consequences for people in it.
I'm sure that breach was expensive to Equifax internally, but as you say 0 external consequences mean, what company will change their ways...?
If you put someone in business into the position of choosing between getting their job done/making money and adhering to a set of IT/Security rules, I can tell you which one they'll take :)
How do you avoid this? Well it's not easy and it's not cheap. The most important part is ensuring that IT isn't treated like an expense, but an enabler. then you work with your business teams to make sure they have the services they need to get the job done, as safely as possible.
Security teams shouldn't be blockers, but advisors. for this to work, it needs to be acknowledged that the business leaders own the risks ofc.
That's massively easier to write than do, but from what I've seen of various companies, it's pretty much the only way to have a chance of doing things without huge amounts of shadow IT.
Hence IT department has to charge everything it does, swamping everyone involved - business and IT both - in bullshit paperwork, taking time from everyone. Like a finance version of fighting entropy, you can have everything perfectly neatly ordered but it takes effort.
Then someone in IT gets sick of hearing bullshit hopes and dreams ideas from business; "Ok, but what if cereal box toys were spruced up with crypto? Go cost it up will ya?"
And so IT swings the financial ban hammer with $20000 quotes. Bullshit begets bullshit.
There will be a "who you know" club of people from business and IT who can skip the bullshit, not fill out the financial paperwork, meet over coffee or lunch and hash out ideas. If this club does not exist, woe betide the company.
At a former workplace, we got our own internet connection to not have to deal with IT. We got our own computers for that connection. We hired outside contractors instead of using internal people because IT was a hassle to deal with.
We spent tons and tons of money to only have to deal with accounting and not coordinate with IT.
You built a better IT. Shouldn't they replace your existing legacy IT dept?
Seriously, IT shouldn't impede dev teams.
Now if they can simplify this a bit into the cloud, the key for business is to DOWNSKILL this so basically an office manager can do it, then you are golden. If they can even save ONE it salary - amazing. And if users can self service a bit more - also amazing.
The rampant dysfunction in large organizations never ceases to amaze me.
It can make it a little awkward when you finally work for a client who knows what they're doing and you do "8 weeks" of work in 5 days, but that's rare.
Not really any different than when you're an FTE and you're dependent on external factors to get your work done.
I want to redirect this to a certain authority in The Netherlands, but I might get shot. It takes more than month to onboard and even then, you still need to do something extra to get certain rights.
Standard users don’t get local root/admin in a corporate environment since the Win2k days, and seem to have few issues in comparison.
Many devs seem perfectly willing to pull any random executable off the internet and run it without inspection or concern. Because they “know what they are doing”, right?
This offering makes perfect sense to replace those dumb dell machines equipped with 4gb ram and a core i3 with even dumber machine and slash the local it team.
Think of thin clients, all over again.
Think of call centers.
Think of receptionists, or bank clerks that all they do is use internal web-based software, and print a pdf file.
No more hardware maintenance, just throw away the whole thing (the dumb terminal) and replace it with a new one, we'll send it in for repair later.
Heck, you could even netboot the raspberry pi and save on SD cards too.
It's a security/usability trade off for me.
Installing an Ethernet LAN network is the best investment for anyone who works from home.
Wi-fi really sucks in urban areas and soon even in rural areas because of the IoT crap.
And I could've done the wiring for 2/3 of the price, btw.
Also, if GP had laid cat-6 cables maybe they might upgrade switch and clients to 10gbit/sec Ethernet.
Also Ethernet is definitely useful for latency. Having sub 1ms latency on a wifi network is very very difficult, and definitely not going to happen with 5 routers.
I work on a lot of systems with public and private facing endpoints and so I have a remote session running on a machine outside our network as well.
It works pretty well.
That sounds as if the person dealing with it would be completely incapable of replacing a failing dev. system in a timely manner. Keep a few replacement systems ready and your IT has all the time in the world to deal with those issues without blocking anything important.
I can just imagine the people responsible for that mess dealing with cloud services: I am sorry but we used up all the cloud licenses management signed of on, we will push for more licenses on the next quarterly budget meeting until then have these leftover sheets of paper and this dried out pen from our office supplies.