Cloud is not just about the money. Sure, savings and efficiency is important, but companies put more stress on the cloud’s flexibility and agility. That might seem a bit strange in this age when every cost — whether you’re running IT, HR or Purchasing — is under the microscope. But according to the 451 Group, which conducted a survey earlier this year on leading factors that matter most to organizations moving workloads onto the cloud, the priorities are on performance. Here’s a list, in order of importance, of cloud priorities:
- Flexibility in scaling IT up and down
- Agility
- Cost reduction
- Quicker time to deliver services
- Avoidance of capital expenditure
- Quicker time to value
- On-demand access
- Pay as you go
- Disaster Recovery
- Transparency of costs
- Other responses
I thought it was interesting, too, that both on-demand access and disaster recovery made it onto that list of priorities. As more and more firms migrate to the cloud, it’s more important for them to tap into cloud-based services that, for example, monitor the ups and downs of cloud platforms and notify them when their websites or databases experience performance problems — so they can take action to prevent a disaster.
There’s definitely a more mature sense of the cloud and what to expect from it out there these days. Are you seeing it, too?