1. You don’t have a compelling business need.

Having cloud on your resume may make you one of the popular kids, but you have to ask what problem you are trying to solve when considering any technology. Due to the many different interpretations of the cloud computing concept, odds are favorable one of them will provide a benefit to your organization.  Just as likely, though, are the interpretations that will require a lot of work but little benefit.  You should carefully evaluate your needs against the benefits and drawbacks of any proposed cloud solution.

Look at a few of the commonly touted benefits of cloud computing environments and determine if you have needs addressed by these benefits:

• Ability to handle fluctuations in IT demand and reduce in-house IT capacity requirements.
• Economy of scale: skilled resources managing more workloads means less administration cost per workload.
• Operational Efficiencies such as self-service provisioning to decrease provisioning-related business impediments.
• Reduction in capital expenditures and predictability of recurring costs –initial costs are absorbed by the cloud provider and spread out over time and among many consumers along with maintenance and utilization costs.

Roundup

I am not saying that you should not consider cloud solutions.  Do your homework and determine which solutions are right for you, and which of your workloads will benefit.  Don’t believe anyone who tells you that tossing your stuff into the cloud will make it all work better — unless you are running everything on 8-year old whiteboxes in a janitorial closet.

Keep in mind that cloud adoption is not an all or nothing proposition.  It is perfectly reasonable to move some of your infrastructure, workloads, or services into a cloud while retaining control of others.  In fact, it is commonly recommended for generic services like web sites or email to be offloaded to a cloud while databases remain in-house.  Recall the way that x86 server virtualization worked its way into many production environments via test, development, and demo labs.  Those same workloads are pretty good candidates for kicking the tires of various cloud implementations. 

Going forward, consider any IT resource that differentiates you from your competition as something you probably want to own while general business services may be fair game for the application of some Cloud.  Who wouldn’t rather have their internal IT resources concentrating on services that are core to the business instead of being distracted by the mundane details of other workloads? Or, as Google says, “Run your business, not your email server.”

Doug Baer is a Principal Consultant and leader of the Virtualization Practice at IT Partners in Phoenix, AZ. He holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Arizona, is a regular contributor on the VMTN forums in between customer engagements and is VCDX #19.

Pages: 1 2 3