Hell is other people - Jean-Paul Sartre.
Or at least in our experience, for an IT professional, hell specifically is the group of people within their business that make a massive rowdy racket every time someone changes something. I mean, how dare they?!
But to give the laggards and technophobes a chance, not everyone is interested in technology, and learning new processes can be a drag - especially if you've got more pressing and important issues to deal with.
The IT professional tends to inhabit a small dark corner somewhere between that rock over there and the hard place sat next to it. One of the greatest barriers to change within organisations doesn't come down to budgets, resources, timing, strategic priorities or any of the causes often discussed in change management classes. It comes down to the enormous inertia created by grumpy people.
Given the great incentives, in terms of value and flexibility, created by moving to a cloud-rich IT environment - it seems a shame to pass up on it purely on the basis of some difficult personalities. What you need is some covert cloud deployment. Ninjas in sheep's clothing. Cloud services that don't look like cloud services, but that instead keep the user experience exactly the same.
Coincidentally though (ok it's not that coincidental, I'm trying to sell you a product here), we have a great solution for just this situation... Cloud Drive Mapper - An SSO powered drive mapping utility for OneDrive for Business & SharePoint Online.
Cloud Drive Mapper maps cloud storage from OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online to drive letters. It works just like network file storage - but instead of spending all that precious cash on expensive file servers on site, you can make the most of the cloud storage you likely already have, but are probably not making much use of.
Your users won't know the difference... (Well, they wouldn't if you didn't name the drives 'OneDrive for Business' - you could call it something sneaky like 'Home' instead).
There are lots of reasons for using Cloud Drive Mapper beyond it allowing for covert cloud deployments - here's another blog I wrote about some of them. If you're wanting to adopt the cloud in your organisation and think Cloud Drive Mapper could help - just give it a try...
