Provisioning, Not Procurement
Posted on Thu, Oct 27, 2011 @ 11:36 AM
Kudos to Brad Nieman of Aol Government for writing the pithiest catch-phrase for the Amazon Gov Cloud Summit, held on October 18 in Washington, DC, which I’ve paraphrased as the title of this blog entry. I attended the event virtually, from my desktop, and thought that he captured the spirit of the event just right.
The central idea is that federal buyers no longer need to procure massive systems for every IT need. Instead, they can simply provision the pieces they require—they can “pay by the drink” rather than “ buy the whole enchilada” (if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor).
Among other things, provisioning is much easier and less expensive than procurement. With today’s cloud services, provisioning usually means nothing more than an e-commerce transaction where you select the services you want from a Web storefront, and just order them. In a mature cloud environment, they should be available immediately.
At Brivo we’ve believed for many years that this is the right way to provide physical security services as well as general IT services. Our customers understand that they do not need to purchase an expensive computer system for every building they wish to secure. All they need to do is provision an online account with the services they need, and it’s available immediately.
And the business model follows suit. If you want access control for three doors or surveillance video from three cameras, then that’s all you pay for—by the drink, and by the month or by the year, depending on how your budgets work.
That’s provisioning, not procurement.
- Steve Van Till