IT decision makers are conservative by nature: “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.”

I frequently hear the question, “What does the cloud do for me that I can’t do in my own data centre?” The honest answer is nothing.

There is nothing that can be done in the cloud that couldn’t also be done in an in-house data centre or with collocated hardware in an external data centre.

However, almost everything a business may want to do with IT can be done more quickly, less expensively, and with intrinsically more scalability in the cloud. That’s the true value of cloud platforms.

A business could choose to buy and collocate new servers when updating its groupware application. It’s a simple process of getting approval for the capital expenditure, procuring the servers and the data centre space, paying for support and licensing, paying for server …