Cloud migration is the answer. To what question, exactly, is not always clear.
Over the past decade, 'move to the cloud' has become the default recommendation for businesses reviewing their IT. Some of that is justified. None of it is universally true.
The businesses that migrated without properly understanding what they were migrating from, what they were migrating to, and why, are now learning that lesson at considerable expense.
What cloud migration actually is
Moving IT infrastructure to the cloud means moving workloads from hardware that sits in your premises to hardware that sits in a data centre owned by someone else. You pay a subscription for the use of that hardware, typically on a per-user or per-resource basis.
The advantages are real: no capital expenditure on hardware, no physical maintenance, no hardware refresh cycle, geographic resilience, scalability on demand, and access from any location.
The disadvantages are also real: ongoing subscription costs that increase as the business grows and never stop, performance that depends on internet connectivity, data stored and processed in infrastructure you do not physically control, and dependency on a third-party provider whose pricing and terms can change.
None of this makes cloud migration wrong. It makes it a decision that requires analysis rather than assumption.
The businesses that tripled their costs
The most common form of cloud migration regret involves cost.
On-premises infrastructure has a high upfront cost and modest ongoing cost. Cloud infrastructure has minimal upfront cost and high ongoing cost. For businesses that run their analysis over a three-to-five year horizon, on-premises is often cheaper in total cost of ownership, particularly for workloads that do not benefit materially from the cloud's scalability.
A business that replaces a £15,000 server with cloud services at £800 per month has, in 19 months, spent the equivalent of the server it replaced, and will continue to spend that amount every month thereafter. If the cloud service includes features the business genuinely uses and values, that may be excellent value. If it is simply the server workload in a different location, it is significantly more expensive.
This is the calculation that resellers who earn a margin on cloud licence sales have a structural incentive not to work with you.
Cloud-appropriate versus cloud-first
Cloud-first means defaulting to the cloud for new workloads. Cloud-appropriate means evaluating each workload and deciding where it is best served.
Email and productivity applications: cloud is almost always the right answer. Communication and collaboration tools: cloud. Line-of-business applications written for on-premises environments that do not run natively in the cloud: not necessarily cloud. Large data storage with frequent local access: depends heavily on bandwidth. High-performance computing: often still better on-premises.
A responsible IT partner will tell you when cloud is not the right answer as readily as when it is.
What the right conversation looks like
Before any migration, the right conversation covers: what are you trying to achieve? What are the total costs over three to five years for each option? What does your connectivity look like, and is it adequate for a cloud-first environment? What are the data sovereignty and compliance implications? What happens if the provider has an outage? What does the exit strategy look like if you want to change?
IT-Works approaches cloud migration without a commercial preference for cloud over on-premises. We assess the business needs, what it currently has, what the transition would involve, and what the total cost of each option looks like over a realistic time horizon. Sometimes the recommendation is cloud. Sometimes it is on-premises. Sometimes it is both.
If your IT provider has only ever recommended cloud, that is worth noticing.
IT Works cloud strategy review: enquiries@it-works.co.uk | 0121 270 0808 | https://it-works.co.uk/cloud-migration/