What should organisations consider when thinking about cloud computing?
Firstly, why cloud, what is it you're looking to achieve? Perhaps you're looking to lower the operational cost, maybe you're looking to launch a new business service and you're having to invest upfront in the infrastructure needs on it, perhaps there's some business expertise you get from a cloud vendor that would influence your choice or maybe you're just trying to launch a new service really quickly the nest thing I'd say would be which business services, not all services are appropriate to run on a cloud there might be national or legislative requirements around data where is it held, who has access to it? There might be affordable bandwidth restrictions meaning you can't run certain numerically intensive applications in a cloud environment. At the end of the day what you need to do is consider what's core to the business, what represents your competitive advantage what do you need to manage and govern internally and what can you put outside, what's noncore, what might be a peak workload that's difficult to plan for. Whether you chose for cloud or your chose to run tour servers internally there are different risk factors involved and you need to assess those risk factors carefully alongside the service you're looking to adopt.