Making the move to cloud work for you

Moving to the cloud should be considered in the same way. It doesn’t make sense to migrate the limitations of the old system intact – it would be the equivalent of shifting that hideous old vase from the centre of the mantelpiece to the centre of the new one.

Many companies do not fully capitalise on the scalability offered by cloud. Although many use the capability of cloud to get hold of resources at short notice in response to demand shortfall, they are less inclined to decrease capacity in response to a decline in demand.

This is not surprising, as traditionally, IT teams have had to add physical capacity in response to user issues associated with performance. It was usually too difficult to take this capacity away when demand reduced.

“Right-sizing” is much easier to accomplish with cloud. A healthcare organisation, for example, discovered that, on average, it was 25% over-specified on cloud processing power and that by introducing better discipline in the execution of existing capacity management processes, it better matched supply and demand to achieve more than 10% cost savings on its overall cloud spend.