To Cloud or Not To Cloud...
There has been a (and I hate to use this phrase) paradigm shift in IT over the past 5+ years to "The Cloud". Non-techie folks ask me all the time..."What is the Cloud?" I tell them that it basically refers to anything you need an Internet connection to access, and I go through the origin of the term relating back to flowcharting, and how an outside connection (like the Internet) was always represented by the shape of a cloud. They get the idea...but it turns out there are lots of IT people who themselves don't really grasp the entirety of this shift.
To "Cloud" means you are giving up a large portion of control of your infrastructure. You are putting your trust in the fact that the services will be there and stable, that redundancies will work, that the hardware will be maintained, that the pricing will remain fair, that the Cloud portion of your infrastructure really is safe and secure.
I was not a proponent of Cloud services until over the past year or two. The two reasons for that were trust and price. I didn't trust that majority of providers and the cost was too high. But now that many bigger corporations have committed to Cloud strategies, the pricing as come down to a level attainable by SMBs, and now that Azure has reached a point where it is mature enough, the old reasons not to Cloud have been wiped away.
I still believe that for some things, like Active Directory, it is good to have on-premise servers, but if Microsoft takes my advice, soon even that will be best hosted in the Cloud. Whether to Cloud or Not To Cloud comes down to:
1) Do you trust the provider?
2) Does the pricing VS on-premise hardware make sense for you?
3) Do you have someone with competency in their IaaS platform?
If all of those line up, then you are go for lift-off. Up you go into the wild "Azure" yonder.
Good overview Justin. I took a rack of servers to the cloud several years back, and I think your analysis is spot-on. We found the pricing to be 50% higher than we anticipated, security to be on-par or superior to what we could manage in-house, and reliability/uptime to be....less than 100%, but very good. My additions would be: 1 - don't underestimate how much work it will be to move to the cloud. Remember that you'll be uploading EVERYTHING through a relatively small pipe. 2 - decide how you will handle email ahead of time. This will be one of your biggest challenges. We moved everything to GMail, and I wish we'd have done it years ago. 3 - don't underestimate how much disk space you will need, and make sure that you can stomach the monthly price (over the course of a month or two you could easily buy the drives that you're renting).