Some common misconceptions about cloud computing are holding organizations back from transitioning related groups of applications to the cloud and capturing the available benefits. Here are some common myths together with a more accurate reality:
- The main value of cloud business cases is IT cost reductions. In reality, additional revenue and operating cost-reduction opportunities far exceed the value of IT cost reduction opportunities.
- Cloud computing costs more than in-house computing. In reality, most organizations understate their in-house computing costs due to poor cost tracking. More significantly, the cloud offers cost benefits derived from shared technical professionals, shared computing resources, and autoscaling.
- The security I can set up and control in my own data centers is superior to the security on the cloud. In reality, cloud service providers have made huge investments in cloud security, while in-house security implementations are surprisingly uneven.
- There is greater latency among applications running on cloud providers’ networks than there is on in-house networks. In reality, much of the perception of greater latency is caused by issues in the internal network of companies or too much backhauling of data from the cloud to the on-premise data center.
- Moving to the cloud eliminates the need for an infrastructure organization. In reality, when companies transition to the cloud, they will encounter many, perhaps hundreds of services that can be combined, rearchitected, and reconfigured to improve integration, performance, and security. Capturing these benefits requires an infrastructure organization that changes its focus to implement these opportunities.
- The most effective way to transition to the cloud is to focus either on applications or on entire data centers. In reality, focusing on individual applications delivers few benefits while moving entire data centers is risky. It’s best to transition logical groups of applications associated with one business function.
- To move to the cloud, you must either lift and shift applications as they are today or refactor them entirely. In reality, lift and shift delivers few benefits while refactoring is costly, risky, and takes too long. The best approach is to focus on exploiting cloud features such as automation, abstraction, and containerization as part of the transition.