Have you ever tried to build your own television? Or computer perhaps? Apart from the real technical puritans, the answer is probably no. The answer to it is pretty simple: because it will take too much of an effort, because you lack the knowledge and because buying is much easier, cheaper and faster. However, while this may be true on the consumer level, it isn’t always true when speaking about applications and infrastructure. Why are many businesses still convinced they have to build it themselves? And if they choose this approach, are they right?
Cheaper is often more expensive
As a business, the choice at this moment can be a hard one at first. If you move to the cloud (license fee) your costs will be higher compared to keeping it on your server (capital costs). However, there is a spoiler to this assumption. When you also count the operational costs, like maintenance and updates, for many companies the opposite becomes true. Moving your infrastructure to the cloud requires fewer people, is faster, offers more opportunities and makes your TCO lower.
So why don’t they do it?
There are many possible answers to this, often depending on the nature of the business, business culture and management structure. Financial institutions, for example, feel they need to protect the privacy of their data at all costs, meaning they won’t trust it to AWS, Azure or Google. Or perhaps there are many ‘old’ legacy applications which are vital to the business and can’t easily be moved. Or maybe the focus isn’t just there yet. Also, not every company is keen on innovation when commerce is going well and the immediate benefit is not clear.
Building blocks
However, in most circumstances these arguments do not hold against reality. Building a television yourself is a waste of time and money. And it’s not even necessary too, since there is a really nice solution to it: ‘building blocks’
Industrialized IT
In the last few years building an IT infrastructure has become ‘industrialized’ fast. Just like you can build a house really fast and cheap by using premanufactured walls and roofs, the same counts when building pipelines or even when moving your whole infrastructure to the cloud.
Focus, focus, focus
The secret is this: focus on what you can change, move and replace in a fast and clean way by using building blocks. This means you easily set the walls, roofs, doors and interior, leaving a small percentage to be customized, or not done at all when using a hybrid model.
High maintenance for integration
The point is that integration is key for a successful infrastructure. Building everything yourself will sound nice at a party, but provides you with high maintenance cost to keep your handmade pipeline structure integrated with all applications in place.
Pragmatic approach
Going for the ‘best’ solution often isn’t the best solution. Balancing between costs and benefits is the smart move to make. Sometimes it’s better to opt for a build application which will work for 98%, instead of building it yourself from scratch to reach the full 100%. It’s not worth the effort and definitely not the costs. You simply can’t compete with Amazon, Google or Microsoft. You’re better off being concerned with what adds value to your business and provides your personnel with easy to use tools and a smooth infrastructure, because at the end that’s what really matters.
Do you want to know more about building applications and setting your infrastructure using building blocks? Get in touch with one of our experts for more information!
