Why is it difficult to get buy-in for transforming network architecture to a decentralized or distributed model?
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When it comes to getting buy-in for decentralized or distributed network architecture, this issue isn’t just the time it takes, it's that the journey is not simple to exhibit. If you can't articulate what the transition looks like to the decision makers, why would they put their neck on the line to back it? They don't know what it's going to look like or how long it's going to take.
Every day you build more into legacy systems, it adds to the complexity. If you're starting with a clean slate, it's much easier. Business continuity is key and trying to transform your network without disrupting anything makes the problem a lot more difficult. That means that anytime you are touching a component, you have to have redundancy built in. You need to have that double and make sure that the consistency of the data is maintained while you are making progress, and then eventually you flip the switch.
I'm not sure that you can't portray the business value of it to get that buy-in, even if you use decentralized as the midstep between central and distributed. This notion that everybody has to go to cloud before they do anything else is past its prime. And people have realized that if we do the lift and shift, and we rewrite and refactor all of our back office systems, we're spending a lot of time and cost to create a new form of legacy. But if we take centralized systems, like an ERP, and put that in a distributed environment, or refactor it as distributed, then you have a midway point. That’s when you can start looking at those systems and define what you’ll do in each phase, how long each phase will take, and how much business value you’ll get from it.<br><br>I look at the most successful companies in terms of their transformation and you have to phase it in over periods of time, in chunks, as opposed to framing it as this long journey that's going to segue here, there, and everywhere, because then it seems you'll be on that road from now until forever. If you can phase-gate it in a certain way, then that gives you the opportunity to start chunking those systems. That is an easier path to distributed architecture than going to the cloud only to figure out that the cloud is not doing everything for you, has certain issues, and is costing you a huge amount of money to do the same thing you were doing in your own data center.
It might be primarily related to cost and the difficulty to understand how would the controls could be as effective as the centralized model.