Are you ready for the cloud?: Financial

Cloud financials, a cloud with money behind it

In my previous POST, I discussed several different points about moving to the cloud. A lot of companies do it for many reasons, but the majority of them in my experience normally come down to two major reasons: 1) Financial 2) Security of business. The security tab isn’t the same as say a password or encryption; I mean it as a form of reassurance in the case of disaster or redundancy.

Lets take the first reason in this Blog: Financial. Many people incorrectly assume that moving everything to the cloud can save them millions of dollars, and they can see an immediate return on their investment right away. Bad news people, that’s not normally how it goes.

Remember, that no commercial hosting cloud provider does it for free. And if you have your own cloud stood up at a hosted colocation, you are still paying fees for the three “Ps” (ping, power and pipe). The next expense that does not go away quickly is people. It takes knowledge to migrate your systems and /or applications to the cloud. Even if you fire your entire staff, and had a third party come in to do the work, you will still spend more money on that happening, because they have to learn your systems before they can accomplish your migration.  Also, allot comes down to trust too.  Having a team that you have trained from the ground up, helps you. Why?  You will know where their cloud “knowledge stack” is at all times.  You will know what cloud platforms they have been trained on and so forth.

Alternately, if you are planning your cloud migration, and you are going to use your own internal resources to do it, the big question is: “Are they ready?” Going back up to the two reasons why companies migrate to the cloud, Financial and / or Security of business, this question encompasses both. How?

I will discuss that on my next POST.