The Cloud won't make you more profitable, agile or effective

"Cloud first companies has 30% More revenue"

For the past few months, I've noticed a shift among decision makers. Previously, our discussions have been regarding cloud as an enabler. They wanted to use the cloud where their IT department didn't stand a chance to keep up with business pace, where they were limited by internal processes and when they didn't had the time to wait for new hardware.

"The IT director looked worried: the cloud will most likely explode soon. I see that we have increased our consumption by 150% this year alone - it seems that we're no longer in control. We need to set permissions, limitations and rules for the usage. Otherwise we will blow our budget."

My recent discussions with several of my customers have been about limitations, quotas, and permissions. I agree that it's important that you know how to handle permissions, that you have policies and cost management in place and that you provide guidelines for the cloud - but come on, is a new datacenter really what you want to achieve?

I agree, the trend is clear. According to Gartner 2016 the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market has been growing more than 40 percent in revenue per year since 2011, and it is projected to continue to grow more than 25 percent per year through 2019.

As a cloud expert I have three pieces of advice for you. Instead of quotas and limitations, start with these three things.

1. Manage cost. You could easily manage this without setting quotas. Cloud cost management is better done by monitoring. Take a look at services like Cloud Cruiser or similar.
2. Put some effort into a proper cloud strategy & governance model so you know how to handle permission on the right levels, account structures, standards, integrations, network and security.
3. Build an organisation to SUPPORT your transformation. There will be new competencies needed for sure.

This being said, the cloud could for sure give you lots of advantages in terms of cost management, time to market, and agility but not if it’s managed like a regular data center.

What are your ideas on this topic?