Oh the Cloud, yes, I remember first hearing and seeing the marketing hype. I believe it was back in 2009 or so when I saw my first Cloud commercial. “To the Cloud” I remember hearing as if some magical place existed that paralleled the city of OZ. Fast forward several years and it’s obvious that the providers have thrown all their chips in. As the cloud grows stronger and more powerful, hardware companies continue to look for ways to sell hardware to customers who could be lost forever. Many of the bandwidth and latency concerns have been addressed and many companies have made the giant leap to the cloud. With the promise of no longer having to manage a data center, many CIO’s bit. They all learned a hard lesson. Cloud isn’t cheap. The providers know they have a tremendous amount of leverage over you because nobody wants to move once they’re there. I have a history of being skeptical. I guess it’s in my blood. Not sure why but it is what it is. I remember HP coming to us singing the benefits of blade computing. All of the money we could save with power and cooling. We did our own research and guess what, our research didn’t match what they were telling us. We didn’t bite and our rack mount servers continued to work fine. Along came virtualization and space really didn’t matter as much. I was so glad that we hadn’t gone down that route, but I digress. When we determined what our Cloud strategy was going to be, we looked at it pragmatically. I can either pay 500k for this hardware upgrade and capitalize over 3-4 years or I could move it to the cloud, and spend the money on the Opex side. What about this new application? What about my legacy applications? How does disaster recovery fit into the equation? My piece of advice for you and “The Cloud” is to spend the time to see what actually makes sense. We were spending a ton of money on a hot site contract. The Cloud made sense. Our Internet facing applications need to be protected at a higher level. The Cloud made sense. This new application can be ran in “The Cloud” or on-prem. It’s never been in our environment. The Cloud made sense. Legacy applications? Hold on a sec. A forklift move for all of your legacy applications to the Cloud very rarely pays off. Think more about the long term goals of what that software does for your company and put your effort there. For example, just forklift SAP ECC to the cloud? No thanks. Long term ERP strategy is S4/Hana? Spend your money there. Develop your Cloud Playbook and use it to guide your decisions. Always think about a back out plan. Wishing you the best in your Cloud journey!
-Cheers
