Why is Cloud the solution to all problems?

It isn’t. If you look for the definition of Cloud, you’ll find various descriptions, but I doubt you’ll find one that says that Cloud will solve all of your issues.

My personal view is that Cloud is not so much a technology, an application or a tool. Cloud is a philosophy, a set of principles (some of which are not even that new). Cloud is a means to an end, and that end comes in many shapes and forms.

Here are some of the most common reasons why people think of going to the Cloud, by no specific order:

·         Scale IT capacity up and down, on demand

·         Increase flexibility,  agility and effectiveness

·         Achieve higher cost efficiency by paying for what you need, when you need it

·         Facilitate automation and self-provisioning of infrastructure and/or applications

Now, all of the above are not givens, i.e. the effectiveness and efficiency of any Cloud will depend greatly on HOW the end state environment has been designed and HOW the legacy environment will be migrated across (if we’re not talking about a green field implementation). For instance, it’s not just because the Cloud facilitates Disaster Recovery that environments will be 100% safe. As an example of this, just recently severe storms hit Amazon’s largest data centre in Virginia, US, causing downtime to companies like Netflix, Heroku, Pinterest and Instagram.

The conclusion? Cloud computing offers great potential to optimize businesses, but it’s down to each individual or company to decide how to best use that potential. From the example above, one can learn that Cloud may enable a company to recover with increased agility from a disaster situation, but don’t expect providers to be able to deliver services with an absolute 100% uptime. You should always plan and prepare for a provider outage. You know the saying, fail to prepare is to prepare to fail.