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CONFIGURATION OR CUSTOMISATION ? YOU ARE NOT PICKING ICE CREAM FLAVOURS , SO CHOOSE WITH CARE
Morey Haber , Chief Security Officer at BeyondTrust , tells us about the critical choice between customisation and configuration in Cloud Computing , highlighting its impact on business efficiency and costs .
It is a tale as old as IT itself . How do we , the business , procure a solution that does exactly what we need when the likelihood of such a product sitting on a shelf somewhere is negligible ? And so , we engage in a tug of war ( also as old as IT itself ) between customisation and configuration . The choice we make has real-world implications such as hidden costs , additional risk and an increased labour burden .
If one weighs the pros and cons carefully , it should be possible to come up with a way forward that can satisfy business use cases .
The customisation-configuration face-off was never more prominent than in the years since 2020 when the GCC region moved , almost as one , to the cloud . CIOs could choose to tweak a product for their organisation ’ s unique ends ( customisation ). Achieved with or without vendor support , the enterprise could customise via a third-party add-on or write custom code to sidestep out-of-the-box limitations .
Alternatively , IT could go for a product that already comes with a lot of options to change runtime behaviour and attributes . Configuration is supported via product documentation that instructs on when to adjust settings and when to leave them alone . No custom code or software developer ’ s toolkits means a cleaner deployment .
But . . . the cloud
All this , while a conundrum , seems like a straightforward trade-off . If one weighs the pros and cons carefully , it should be possible to come up with
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