AWS | Sten Vesterli's Blog

You don’t save anything by moving to the cloud. Ask around – how many of the organizations you know who moved to the cloud have reduced operations headcount? Some things are simpler in the cloud, but many others are more complicated.

You enforce some good security practices because there is no way to NOT install the latest security patches. And you can quickly spin up an extra testing environment.

But unless you really have a highly variable load, or you are starting something new where you don’t have a clue how much power you’ll need, the cheapest option is to buy some hardware and put it in your server room.

The next time one of the vendors tells you how much you save by moving to the cloud, take a really good look at the calculation. I’ll be happy to help you. You will likely find out that there isn’t a business case for moving.

The future IT leaders are coming from the cloud business. Jeff Bezos just announced he is stepping down as CEO, and the new CEO is Andy Jassy, who was running their cloud business. That business is a small part of Amazon’s turnover, but more than half their profits. At Microsoft, Satya Nadella was running Azure before he became CEO of Microsoft.

The next CIO in your organization is also going to be someone with experience running successful cloud-based solutions. And if you are an IT leader and looking to move up to larger things, you will need some cloud successes under your belt, too.

Just be aware that your career doesn’t just need cloud, it needs cloud solutions that provide significant business benefits without loss of flexibility. It is easy to rack up large cloud bills without anything to show for it, or to get locked into an inflexible cloud solutions. It is not easy to create successful cloud solutions. That’s why those who can will get ahead.