When is “cloud first” a good strategy for organisations?
Wed 4 May 2016
Much has been written by industry commentators regarding the potential benefits of cloud computing for enterprise customers and other organisations, such as the ability to reduce spending on IT infrastructure by provisioning some or all IT services on a pay-per-use basis, with the ability to easily scale up or down the resources consumed in response to their requirements.
These benefits have led some organisations most notably the UK government, to put in place a “cloud-first” policy. This dictates that all new IT projects and services should be built in or procured from a cloud service provider, unless there are mitigating reasons as to why this approach cannot be followed.
In response to this, we decided to examine where a “cloud-first” strategy may be appropriate. As a starting point, we surveyed a number of IT decision makers to ascertain their attitudes to cloud services and which IT functions they might be happy to offload to a cloud provider, and whether some need to be retained in house.
This whitepaper aims to address the question of when a “cloud-first” approach is appropriate for organisations and when another option may be better suited.
