C7. Don't duplicate a commodity service available at a greater economy of scale

Not everything that service owners within DoIT spend time and resources on provides direct business value to our customers. This is not to say that such efforts are unnecessary, or unworthwhile. Some services support and enable other units’ services, and others form the critical infrastructure that makes all the work of our Division possible. However, many times, we as a Division run services ourselves, for historical reasons that, if the decision were revisited today, would not appear cost effective. This is particularly true as, with the progress of technological innovation in the public cloud, lower-level services such as the provision of virtual machines, disk storage, and even databases are becoming commoditized and offered at a favorable price point due to economies of scale on the part of the public cloud provider. To the credit of the Division, we have stopped doing a number of these sorts of things already, and migrations are currently underway for others. This trend, aimed to reduce the number of services that duplicate a commodity service available elsewhere, freeing up resources to properly support the things we do that are unique to our environment, should continue.