Thank you, interesting.

Then "infra" would be under "IT" in such kind of setups?

From my experience it was bit different - say Infra, Dev, Security departments having their own Head Of Dev/Infra/Sec reporting to the CTO and having their budgeting aligned with CTO. CorporateIT being a bit different thing. Procurement may be shared among all of them of course.

Not saying that's the only possible setup of org structure - just what I've used to more.

> Then "infra" would be under "IT" in such kind of setups?

Depends what you mean by "infra".

The team that would manage your DC (either self managed or CoLo) would generally be under the CFO or COO (who will generally report to CFO), and as such that team would fall into the Finance procurement bucket.

Even if R&D has budget for multiple racks in your DC, it will still cost money on the Finance&IT side of the house to staff people to maintain it and manage it.

This model is very clunky, because procurement takes time, and this lack of nimbleness can drastically affect delivery roadmaps.

CFOs also don't like this model as much, because their job is to manage cash flow, keep books and accounts ready for audits, build financial projections, etc and time consuming work like managing IT procurement (while critical) is a major slog.

The model you mentioned is more common now (Platform/Infra team acting as an interface w/ Eng), but even they would offload DC and CoLo management to the CorpIT team.

The structure of the company depends on the needs.

When you have a tiny Corp IT, almost invisible in a company's annual budget, and nobody in the company wants to care about it (a lot of pain but zero rewards) -> it goes to CFO. You have Corp IT as a major cost center which is bigger than all the other spending altogether (mature IT companies) then you want someone knowledgeable and trustable to run it, usually CIO.

Sometimes, Corp IT as internal infrastructure supporting employees, development, backoffice is under the same person running production for the clients. Then standards of the internal IT and external services are the same (and very hard for internal services to achieve).

In other cases, production and corp IT are different departments with not so funny unresolvable collisions, like buying incompatible hardware for testing environment (internal services) and production.

It’s an own goal, why not have infrastructure as a sibling team to the dev team. This is a problem only because I make it a problem, situation

This is an organizational structure that is common industry-wide.

Core IT (not Infra - Infra often means DevOps/Platform which is part of R&D), like any other shared function, is placed under the CFO/COO org because it is a shared internal function that's used to keep the lights on.

These are functions that by definition are a cost center, and as such R&D really doesn't want to own it, as it distracts from the core mission of delivering forward facing features.

The whole point of the DevOps/Platform Eng model was to incorporate operations under R&D, but having R&D own and manage physical assets is a major distraction, and a major reason Public Cloud became popular among plenty of companies.

Cost of compute isn't the only variable that comes to play - depreciation, hiring/firing, security, redundancy planning (because these are physical assets), etc are all significant headaches operationally and financially.

Technology is a tool - you choose the tool that works best. In some cases Public Cloud is the solution, in other cases it's a CoLo. It comes down to your specific organization's needs.