CIO —

According to a Symantec (SYMC) survey, discussed in NetworkWorld, half of all data centers are understaffed: 34 percent are "somewhat understaffed" and 16 percent are "severely understaffed." One poignant quote came from a network manager who said "We recently actually lost 25 percent of our departments in cutbacks. I'm now doing a number of different jobs. I work from home and on the weekends doing things I never had to do before. I am just trying to do more with less. We could use more people, but right now, it doesn't seem to be an option."

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As I interpret his statement, he's not actually a manager at this point, he's a sysadmin—or at least he's a manager who has taken on sysadmin duties as well. Overall, the message from the survey is that IT executives are squeezing costs out of their data centers—although, to be fair, 45 percent of survey respondents said their organization is sufficiently staffed and another 5 percent said they are overstaffed.

Also noted in the survey is how challenging the cost pressure because "data centers are becoming more and harder to manage, with more applications, data and increasingly demanding service-level agreements."

This is an IT perfect storm: higher requirements, fewer resources. And, with all due respect, the aphorism "do more with less" has always struck me as beyond the border between fortitude and fiction.

The reason for this manager/sysadmin's (or should it be sysadmin/manager?) burden is clear: IT is being treated as a cost center, and in tough times cost center budgets get chopped. Gartner's just-released IT budget report says budgets will increase 1.3 percent in 2010, compared to 2009, when they fell 8.1 percent. In other words, IT budgets will be around 6 percent lower than they were in 2008.

And yet, we hear more and more about how the real move to cloud computing will be private clouds—IT organizations implementing cloud computing services in their own data centers. The reasons for this vary, including concerns about security in public clouds, putative cost savings from an internal service group unmotivated by profits, the domain knowledge brought to bear by an internal group versus an outside provider, and so on.

The Case For and Against Private Clouds

Does this cost-cutting square with IT organizations building out their own private clouds? One has to question whether the two things can both be true.

Because if there's one thing that you can count on, implementing a private cloud won't be cheap. Here are the areas that require investment:

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