When will big business move to the Cloud for key business applications? It feels like businesses continue to dip their toes in the water of Cloud based applications. They want to know more about the Cloud, but are not yet willing to commit a core application to being hosted on the Cloud.
If this perception is true, and to be clear, this is only a perception from talking with colleagues in the Health Care, Mortgage and Manufacturing industries. They all are interested, and developers are anxious to learn to program on platforms such as Azure. But there still seem to be some hurdles. Here are some of the ones I hear:
- Cost of hosting is too much when you require a certain degrees of performance
- Usage Throttling
- Fear of future price increase once you are locked into a technology
- Fear of loss of control over the hosting environment
- Loss of Data
- Won’t pass certifications required by my business
- Cost for re-tooling our processes and staff to use the Cloud Services
All of the cloud providers have addressed most of these issues and have solutions to manage those fears or needs.
Azure even has a solution for protecting future costs. Even today you can create a hybrid environment running in the cloud and self-hosted. If that model continues, a mitigation plan for future cost increases may be bringing more cloud hosted applications back home. Of course, Microsoft can continue to increase the cost of self hosted software as well. So, there is no complete future cost protection.
What’s your take? Are you getting into the Cloud? Is it just a fad in your environment? Should it be taken seriously, now that it has matured dramatically? Why not get into the conversation by sharing your comments.
Cheers,
Ben