Most businesses are facing a maze of decisions when defining or redefining their cloud strategy. Constant change is a phrase that associates well with the digital era.

Almost every business is continually in evaluation mode as they are driven by cloud and mobile initiatives to explore new technologies.

Often calls of ‘Cloud First’ or ‘Cloud Always’ mandates are driven by a corporate executive who sometimes (not always) are just pushing it because everyone else is…

The market is flooded with offerings – all claiming to be the best solutions – but are they?

Ask yourself what’s the alternative? What is the cost of doing nothing and keeping things the way they are?

When you peel back the layers of complexity coupled with maturity of Cloud technology it quickly becomes apparent that a Hybrid model will still be the way forward for some time yet.

Cloud adoption and mobility means data is no longer under your control.

Traditionally it was under control, being managed and safe. With Cloud you need to keep managing some of your data on premise and in someone’s data centre. You need a mechanism to actually migrate the constantly changing data (not as simple as lifting and shifting virtual machines), and most importantly, you need to provide ongoing data management in the cloud.

The issue of data management is something most businesses fail to take into account until it’s the last minute, when they realise two critical things.

  • Public cloud infrastructure as a service doesn’t always provide adequate data management, and
  • It’s not responsible for the data you place there.

No matter how available or durable the cloud claims to be, people still make mistakes, security breaches happen and yes even the cloud can go down at times (Google, AWS and Microsoft Azure have all experienced high profile outages).

So to manage all this what typically happens is that a different, independent solution is considered for each individual activity, which will amount to a build of intangible costs and therefore risks and complexity.

So, what’s the alternative?

Perhaps you already have it right, perhaps Cloud will help or could hinder. So when it comes to this discussion, make sure you gather factual information. Search out a true independent advisor (not cloud only centric organisation) and ask the tough questions.

  • What are the true benefits over a given period of time.
  • What are the true costs over given time.
  • What will be my ROI over a period given time.

Contact us for independent advice and we’ll help you through this maze of decisions.