Three Key Facts to Help Sell the Cloud in Your Company

When the ROI argument is not enough, cite these three cloud advantages to convince skeptics...

A constant din of "adopt the cloud" buzz is out there, yet many companies remain skeptical. So how do you sell cloud within your company? Common pro-cloud arguments sell the ROI or the cost savings, but that doesn't always convince decision-makers.

The following post was originally published by David Linthicum at InfoWorld.com on June 9th, 2015.

Here are 3 other facts that can help you sell the cloud when ROI is not enough:

1. Better security

Most major hacks, including the one revealed last week targeting the federal government, are not cloud-related. Although you would think that clouds are the common targets of hackers, in many respect clouds are locked up tighter with modern security. Hackers move on to easier targets.

This reality is counter-intuitive to the Chicken Littles in many companies who have talked about the sky falling if data is placed on public servers. If they spent less time being Chicken Littles and more time focusing on security proactively, they would find that data is more cost-effective to manage in the cloud.  

2. No lock-in

Many companies push back on cloud because they believe that using this technology will lock you into a cloud provider. Although you can certainly modify applications heavily so that they are tightly coupled to the native cloud APIs, and thus not as portable, most cloud-deploying companies that move applications select the "lift and shift" approach that minimize lock-in -- it becomes about the same as your lock-in to Windows or Linux.

With "lift and shift," you're in essence moving the application to a platform analog in a public cloud, so you can move the application and data to the cloud, to other public clouds, and back to your data center.

Of course, to get that portability, you have to design the applications effectively. Bad application designs are not cured by moving them to a public cloud.

3. Better performance

Most people pushing back on cloud cite the fact that because everything is sent and retrieved over the open Internet, performance will naturally be an issue. Although this is indeed true when dealing with chatty applications that communicate too much, their performance stinks whether they are on premises or in a public cloud.

Give the caching systems clouds use, as well as the speed of the networks, applications in public cloud typically performs better than on-premises ones. Remember: With the cloud, you can provision more resources on the back end to handle performance killers such as database reads and write. This ability to provision and de-provision resources to enhance performance means that you can afford better-performing applications in the cloud.