Cloud or not to Cloud?

Source: Druva blog, TechTarget & Giagom

http://www.druva.com/blog/cloud-cloud-answering-cios-top-5-questions/
http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/feature/To-cloud-or-not-to-cloud-Whats-your-cloud-migration-strategy
http://research.gigaom.com/2014/10/8-reasons-not-to-move-to-cloud/

When searching "Cloud or Not to Cloud" I found many articles.  There are actually the first three articles that came up.


Druva makes some good points but others are a bit exaggerated.  I do agree with them that security in a public cloud is likely to be the same as if not better than what you have internally.  Obviously if security is a function of your business, i.e. DOD, you should be better than the cloud security wise, but for most organizations it might actually be better.  I disagree with them on cost.  We're using multiple "AS's"  SAAS, IAAS, etc. in my organization, we have some software applications running in the cloud, we have some bare metal severs in the cloud, and we host our website off-premises.  While the upfront costs many times can be significantly less if you are having to purchase a physical server, the reoccurring costs can over time make up any differences.

Also, if you are not having to purchase new hardware the up-front costs for implementing new systems can be much cheaper.

TechTarget seems to think the move is inevitable, you just need to plan your strategy, so it's fairly biased in saying organizations should be moving to the cloud.

Giagom lists some interesting points as well for not moving to the cloud.  While I am not someone who thinks that the cloud is the savior of IT departments everywhere but the points made in this article are fairly lame.

Culture?  I'm not sure what they mean by this, most users in an organization have no idea where their systems are located.  Market Maturity?  In this day and age Cloud has been around for 10 years or more, that is mature these days. Organization capability?  They start talking about how DevOps is a requirement to move something to the cloud.  What makes sense to move to the cloud for most organizations are those systems that can be wholly hosted off-site.  No capabilities required.  This article seems to imply that moving to the cloud is an all or nothing event, which is most definitely not the case.

I think for most organizations moving to the cloud means picking and choosing those systems that make sense from a cost, convenience or availability standpoint, it is not an all or nothing proposal.  We use it for systems that make sense.  Our main website receives a lot of traffic and uses more bandwidth than we can provide so we moved it off-site.  Smaller websites can be co-hosted on a virtual machine with other websites, the cost to do this is much less than it would be to host with the same provider that hosts our main website.  The reason for this is we had already invested the time and money into our virtual server infrastructure.  Other systems we have moved to the cloud were new ones that required special hardware that would be more expensive to purchase versus having it hosted off-site.