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Hybrid IT For Dummies, HPE Special Edition 34 These materials are © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. Doing it yourself Traditionally, companies have taken a do‐it‐yourself (DIY), pay‐as‐you‐go approach to the data center. Through separate capital and operational budgets, hardware and software is procured, placed into service and depreciated over a period of, generally, three to five years (although this time frame is sometimes adjusted if needs are different). The DIY method is sometimes considered the most resource‐ intensive option out there because, as the name suggests, you're doing everything yourself, and you have to hire people with appropriate skills across a variety of disciplines. Although many cloud advocates may deride DIY as a legacy approach, nothing could be further from the truth. Aspects of the approach can use some improvement, but other aspects work well. DIY success also depends on the tools at hand, and the tools for DIY'ers are getting much, much better. In fact, a lot of what enables cloud providers to do amazing things is open sourced, and that know‐how is coming down to the on‐ premises DIY crowd. On the plus side, because DIY is most often associated with on‐premises or co‐located data centers, there is also a rec- ognition that it's easier to deal with many of the application performance issues that were discussed in previous chapters. After all, you're housing the application close to the user, so latency and the like shouldn't be a problem. Plus, when prob- lems arise, time to respond is much faster in an on‐premises environment. On the downside, a DIY approach often implies that a massive capital purchase was made. However, as previously men- tioned, this isn't always true anymore, either, as companies continue to expand their pay‐as‐you‐go offerings. On the staffing front, DIY also implies that you're hiring people to do all the work and that you're hiring a variety of skill sets. This is, perhaps, one of the biggest challenges in IT. And although enterprise IT vendors such as HPE are con- tinually simplifying their products, you still need people to manage it all.