To cloud or not to cloud...

The discussion about using a cloud enabled IT environment always seems to focus on technical and financial questions. And for very good reasons.

In a cloud environment your business critical applications run on some external IT platform, you definitely need to ensure your overall IT-strategy doesn’t get compromised. Datacenters, networks, security, you name it, there are myriad topics that your IT-specialists have been working on for years,  you just don’t shove that aside casually.

Also, a cloud environment requires a new way of looking at IT costs. You know what your internal IT costs, but pricing in the cloud is another ballgame. And it’s not always cheaper…

While these considerations are extremely important, they are not the driving factors when discussing to go for the cloud or not. After all, they are means, not goals. They are influencers, not decision makers.

Technology and money are definitely part of “how” and “what”, but only rarely determine the “why” you’d be going to the cloud.

Let’s zoom in a bit on the “why”:

Your company has a strategy, mission, and target market. Whatever it is, it only rarely includes IT. So IT is not your core business or your core expertise, you just need to have IT to run your core business. Why have an internal IT-organization if all the expertise, energy, and focus in your company is geared towards your core business? In many cases IT is merely doing a mediocre job, effectively not standing in the way. Is it providing IT technology leadership that enables you to open new markets? Probably not…

Your business also has its ups and downs. It can be seasonality, it can also be a market trend, or sometimes even legislators can force you to run complex models once every quarter or so. Either way your IT is hardly able to adjust to those movements, since the hardware platform is a given, as is the number of FTE’s working on it. You need to size this environment for peak season, leaving it idle during down times.

Your business may also require high levels of security and privacy, sometimes even mandated by authorities. These are very deep (and therefore expensive) skills that you simply may not be able to have around in your IT team.

The above are illustrations of “why” you’d want to go to a cloud solution.

Cloud hosting companies are IT experts, and are able to drive their IT expertise to help you uncover new business opportunities. Whether it’s faster networking, better archiving solutions, or simply the latest and greatest servers, cloud providers have such technologies in the house, and have teams that are always looking for new, leading edge technologies.

Cloud hosting companies have large datacenters with spare capacity that enable customers to scale up (or down) within mere hours or days. You can use the capacity when you need it, and simply put it in hibernation when you don’t.

Cloud hosting companies also have a deep bench of security experts. Well, maybe not all of them, but many do. The ones that do are able to give your data maximum protection, and that offers your users maximum privacy. They have the skills and the tools to adopt every new technology that comes out, to fight every new threat or attack that occurs, or to implement every new piece of legislation that gets issued.

Cloud hosting companies can invoice you depending on the actual use of the environment. Consequently the operational costs for the environment fluctuate directly in line with the movement in your market. And since these are operational expenses (OpEx) indeed, they can be linked (or even charged out) directly to the actual users of this capacity, unlike internal IT organizations with their massive investments (CapEx, showing up on your balance sheet) and their fixed personnel costs.

 As you can see, many of these considerations may have technical or financial dimensions, but technology or money only rarely determines the actual “why”. The need for flexibility does, or wanting to be state-of-the-art does, or requiring top-notch security does. So focus on those aspects when looking at the cloud as a potential solution for your organization.

The “why” determines your need, the “how” and “what” define some of the steps you need to take in order to get to the desired state. Not the other way around.