What are the trade offs?
Not every business application was designed to run in the cloud, so you need to evaluate whether full-blown cloud adoption is right for your organization. In some circumstances — for example those financial services companies that have applications dependent on ultra-fast response times — on-premise solutions may be a better choice.
Where the cost, scalability and flexibility of cloud is a good fit, you still have decisions to make. How much re-engineering is required to optimize your applications for the cloud? What service levels are appropriate? The transition to cloud can be slow, complex and costly.
You’ll also want to consider whether to go with a single cloud supplier or embrace a multi-vendor approach. The big three cloud providers — Amazon, Google and Microsoft — all now provide the same core services. They differentiate themselves through the add-on tooling they provide. That may be useful in, say giving you access to powerful AI tools — but it might also make it more difficult for you to migrate your applications to an alternative provider.
Given the global nature of cloud, it’s important to ensure that whichever provider you go with gives you appropriate data protection — this is particularly important for those companies with customers in the European Union. During the early years of cloud deployment, security was a common concern for companies.