10 Reasons to Say “No” to Cloud Computing ?

I have been writing about the benefits of migrating to the Cloud in previous articles but it is also important to highlight in which circumstances the Cloud Computing route may not be the appropriate one.

Building on some answers to a similar question asked on Quora , here is a list in no specific order of ten good reasons why Public Cloud Computing may not be a good fit for your company:

1) You drive a competitive advantage from the IT capabilities you are considering migrating

2) The IT capability or service you are considering moving is a mission critical aspect of your business

3) You operate under stringent government data security requirements (HIPAA and FISMA in the US)

4) You handle sensitive data and need to control incident responses, eDiscovery and forensic investigations

5) You need to deploy complex enterprise class applications

6) Your IT organization has not sufficient maturity to govern the additional complexity of managing additional processes and outside contracts brought by Cloud Computing

7) You run “big data” applications (i.e., financial) that require extremely low latency and/ or extreme disk I/O requirements

8) You fear that you may end up being locked in to a specific provider (i.e. difficult to reduce the number of seats, issues with portability of data, proprietary rather than open software used by the cloud provider)

9) Overall project costs of migrating to the Cloud negatively impact ROI ( i.e. requirements gathering, customization, integration, data standardization…)

10) The design of the applications you plan to migrate can not cope with horizontal scalability and /or are tightly coupled with multiple other applications

Cloud Computing is NOT an all-or-nothing decision. There is no valid reason to object to a Cloud migration in block. Rather you should look at ways of combining Public and Private Clouds and identify where it makes sense to deploy Cloud and non-Cloud resources by assessing the needs of each of your company applications.

For any non-mission critical, non-competitive advantage, not complex, not heavily regulated, not sensitive applications and other IT capabilities, Cloud Computing could be the right move. Of course you should always validate the Cloud migration ROI with a strong business case.

Despite of all these valid reasons for not, or not yet, moving to the Cloud, an average company can probably draw benefits from a migration for 80% of its IT requirements!

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