Everyday our team here at RightBrain Networks encounters a number of objections to going cloud native. More often than not, these objections are ill founded.
Given the significant advantages of building an application for the cloud infrastructure it runs on, we think it’s unfortunate that any company should let these objections get in their way. And, yet, they continue to come up time and again. For that reason, I thought it would behoove us all to go through the top five cloud objections and explain why they really should be of no concern.
Cloud Objection #1: The Cloud is Insecure
Concerns about public cloud security are still alive and well. The truth is plain and simple: in the majority of cases, the cloud is more secure than most enterprise data centers. Unlike most enterprises, cloud providers are in of running a computing infrastructure. They have a vested interest in maintaining a secure service – otherwise nobody would buy it. For most enterprises, running a secure data center is a cost of doing business – and they want to keep costs low. When the data center your business, the cost-benefit analysis for securing the infrastructure shifts.
Cloud Objection #2: Moving to the Cloud Will Result in Vendor Lock-in
Organizations have always been averse to the idea of becoming dependent on one provider’s technology, and it’s no different with the cloud. While it’s possible to build a cloud-agnostic application, it isn’t to your benefit. Cloud-agnostic applications are built to the lowest common denominator. They therefore can’t take advantage of any single provider’s “special sauce” that would allow you to reduce operating costs and/or leverage innovative technologies.
Cloud Objection #3: The Cloud is too Expensive
Time and again we hear from folks who are cloud-shy because their initial cloud projects got really expensive really fast. And it’s true. If you don’t know what you’re doing in the cloud, it is more expensive than running an application on-premises. A cloud-native application must be built to scale up and down based on demand. If you try to stand up an equal number of servers in the cloud despite the load, as you have on premises, the cloud will be more expensive.
Cloud Objection #4: My People Don’t Know Cloud
It’s true that the cloud requires a new skillset. However, a lack of experience or expertise is not a reasonable objection to going cloud native. IT organizations must keep their skills current regardless of the technologies they adopt. If you can’t find folks with the skills you need, then invest in your existing staff or lean on third-party providers to supplement your skillsets and help you build those skills internally.
Cloud Objection #5: The Cloud is too Risky
Everyone is quick to cite the latest cloud service outage, but a properly designed cloud infrastructure is much more available than an on-premises infrastructure. Plus, it allows you to run a secondary site without duplicating hardware costs, and accommodate seasonal spikes in resource consumption without spending millions of dollars on equipment that’s only used for a couple months out of the year.
Finally, we’d like to note that the cloud isn’t going away. If the cloud were a fad, it would’ve fizzled out by now. Instead, what’s actually happening is forward-thinking organizations are leveraging the cloud and changing the nature of business. The agility and flexibility these organizations gain from going to the cloud is enabling them to innovate in new and exciting ways. Meanwhile, those that are hung up on old objections will increasingly find themselves being left behind.