The Cloud Is For Everyone, But Not For Everything

As a business consultant to manage services providers (MSPs), I often help my clients build a cloud offering to sell to their customers. The first thing I tell them is, “The cloud is for everyone, but not for everything.” Sometimes when I say this I get that “deer in the headlights” look from them.  I then explain my thoughts to them and in this post I will explain them to you as well.

Cloud computing has so much potential to help small, medium, and even large companies. Many business decision makers don’t understand how the cloud can help them. I believe it is up to you, the MSP, to educate them on what should go to the cloud. I was in Allentown, PA taking part in one of my partner’s lunch and learn events. I was having a discussion with one of the attendees about moving their line of business (LOB) application server to the cloud. We discussed the pros and cons; we discussed security, accessibility, and recovery of data. What shut the conversation down was the actual program. The program they use is a design program similar to AutoCAD. We as technologists know the size of AutoCAD files are huge. Based on this particular issue, it was not cost effective for this company to have their LOB server in the cloud. However, this business has no problem with having a replicated copy of their server in the cloud for backup and redundancy.

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