TotalTelecom today published the headlines from a research study commissioned by enterprise ICT solutions and services provider Damovo UK regarding the top priority issues on the agenda of IT Directors in the UK.

The survey results make interesting reading, as much for what they don’t say as for what they say. It appears that over three quarters of IT Directors believe that the consumerisation of ICT is ‘overhyped’. Other subjects mentioned include adoption of social media, mobile workforce management, future-proofing network infrastructure, managing business growth, compliance, resource management. But what is not mentioned anywhere is the word ‘innovation’.

It seems the focus is still very much on the infrastructure management aspects of ICT rather than the potential for innovation. This resonates with our own marketplace experience as consultants where the subject of innovation tends to be owned outside of the ICT department rather than inside it, resulting in a reactive ICT mentality to this subject rather than a proactive culture.

The subject of innovation has been spoken about for so long, yet is apparently beyond the mandate of the ICT department. Whilst there are exceptions to this generalisation, there still appears to be a disconnect between the core business of an organisation and the ICT department which is holding back the IT Director’s ability to lead the innovation debate.

The blogosphere is ablaze with commentary following a major outage to AWS (Amazon’s cloudy elastic computing infrastructure-as-a-service) last week. The impacts to enterprises that utilise this service made the New York Times and polarised opinion across the web. Whilst many commentators have highlighted this as an example of the inherent risks of moving critical services ‘to the cloud’, others have focused on the opinion that such outages are inevitable as cloud services evolve, and that the huge number of companies affected merely showed how successful the cloud has become. But these are simple truisms – use of the cloud represents both risk and opportunity. The trick is figuring out the balance between the two for any particular scenario.

Some of those whose services were down (such as foursquare and hootsuite) are agile, web-based startups that simply don’t have the option of not using the cloud – as building their own bricks-and mortar datacentres would have been too expensive (i.e. without the risk there was zero opportunity). For large enterprises considering a switch from in-house to cloud services, the opportunity is less easily defined and, as the details of Amazon’s problems start to emerge, it is apparent that the risks are also pretty difficult to pin down.

As this Gartner blog nicely articulates, architecting for the cloud is no different from designing conventional data centres services in that failures can and will occur and must be planned for. However, the key difference seems to be that for large-scale public clouds many of the design parameters and failure scenarios are unknown to the end-user, or at least difficult to understand.

In the New York Times article,  the Amazon interruption is compared to the computing equivalent of an airplane crash: “a major episode with widespread damage …but airline travel is still safer than travelling in a car” (with car travel being equivalent to companies running their own data centres). But as any good student of Freakonomics will know, that depends on how you define ‘safer’. The per-hour death rate of cars and planes are about the same – in actual fact, both machines are equally likely to kill you.