Whenever I give my Cloud security talk there's a slide in there talking about the most scary idea about Cloud and Security, the fact that Marketing people will build things on their own while IT, or any other departement isn't involved, and as we all know marketing people have no clue about security, it's not on their mind they won't even think about adding some sort of security to their application.
So IT isn't involved, Development isn't involved , and Operations isn't involved ...
Ages ago.. well.. about a decade I was working in those very marketing departments sitting there, writing code, hired by the marketeers, not by IT , the marketing PM did the talking to IT , we still had to go trough their IT department to get stuff deployed.
The marketing people had to deal with their impossible deadlines, a nationwide tv or radio campaign that was going to be launched , with a supporting website which meant that the website functionality needed to go live just before the first airing of the commercial. Obviously the website was lower priority than finding a famous voice or face to record the commercial with, so it became only late in the planning.. even more obvious was the fact that talking to IT about getting these new features deployed was even later on their planning .
Back then, part of my job was to smooth that process, my role was both creating the technical backend for the sites , putting them in production and doing the daily maintenance afterwards ...
Looking back at those days I realize the pains of both deployment and procurement, getting a new machine racked and then installed up to a bare os installations took up to 6 weeks, in a marketing driven world that meant that I'd often had to bypass the whole procurement process of expensive sunboxen and had to quickly deploy a linux box under my desk that could be used to move to production as plan B , and trust me .. we had to use plan B a lot ..
Letting nontechnical people deploy stuff in the cloud will only widen the gap, but getting involved early enough in the concept fase of a project with a good devops methodology/team in place will give the business people the opportunity to learn that things have changed , it doesn't take 6 weeks anymore to get an expensive Sun box racked and a Solaris instance installed after which a team of engineers needs to install an application server, then a different team needs to install the database etc .. these days it's a virtual machine instantiation and a couple of recipes ,in that way we can get manageable, reproducible and scalable deployments in no time.
