In many contexts, Cloud isn’t the solution. It’s part of the answer, and whether the money should go to Cloud or to some alternative will depend on the nature of the problem.
We know we want it, so Cloud must be a thing, right? If we’re carrying our enterprise IT shopping basket around, we know we want to stop at the Cloud shelf. Once there, we might select a nice fresh IaaS or perhaps some of this SaaS or that. And whatever our selection, we’ll pay the bill at the register. Good thing we brought our shopping list, and with it, our budget for Cloud, right?
Such is what the Cloud marketing machines at the various vendors and service providers want you to believe. Need Cloud, budget for Cloud, pay for Cloud. Cloud is a thing, after all, and we all want that thing.
Not so fast. Cloud isn’t a thing at all. It’s in reality dozens of different things: compute, storage, network, database, development platform, business applications, and more. The value these offerings provide is similarly varied: pay for automated self-service, pay for elasticity, pay for managed services, and so forth.