The one argument that makes Public Cloud a no-brainer

Over the years I build and supported many business cases for Public Cloud. And every time, building the business case for public cloud proved to be challenging (at the least). For every argument in favor of Public Cloud, one easily can find a counter argument, causing a fierce debate between the Public Cloud advocates and the sceptics. I’ve learned that there is one argument that withstands any challenge. The one argument that makes Public Cloud a no brainer. That argument is PEOPLE. 

All efforts to build a business case starts with an excited and passionate team. They take the common shared benefits of public cloud, and don’t leave any angle unexplored. The business objectives are tied to these benefits. Teams will explain how the business objectives benefit from the public cloud innovation, the flexibility and scalability, how secure and reliability of the cloud and, of course, costs benefits. To make a sound business case, you need to go deep on every topic.

If you don’t go deep into the details it’s close to impossible to compare your current IT estate with a hyperscale Public Cloud, like Azure and AWS. There are many aspects, each with their unique attributes, which should be considered, making it insanely complex. Take costs for example. That’s about power, cooling, housing, network equipment, procurement, IT life cycle management and so on. These are the easy ones.

To fully build the business case, you need to go into the details, which requires a good understanding of how Public Cloud is developed, build, and operated. This is also the point where the nature of the dialog shifts from business objectives to IT objectives. Since nobody but IT really cares about the technical details of Public Cloud, building the business case becomes an IT Business case. Business will disengage, widen the gap between business and IT. That’s the point when the trouble starts. 

If you lose the business focus building the cloud business case, the most important reason to move to the Public Cloud will be missed out: Supporting the business to create business value. The focus on the technology leads to a stalemate between the advocates of public cloud and the sceptics. From a technology standpoint, there are a multitude of solutions to solve a problem. Typically, people pick the technology that they know and love.

The Public Cloud benefits are easily countered if you don’t connect these to business value and objectives. 

Take innovation for example. Public Cloud sceptics will say you can achieve the same on-premises because most innovation nowadays is within Open Source. What about Scalability? Do you really need the global scale? Flexibility? “We know the spikes and growth, and we can prepare our infrastructure for that” is what cloud sceptics would say.

How do you make a case for the Public Cloud if most benefits can be easily countered if you are not going deep at the topic? Is there a case for Public Cloud at all? For me that is a clear YES. The reason is that the decision to use Public Cloud is all about your people.

It’s impossible for any company to out-perform the large-scale Public Cloud vendors. Economies of scale truly matter in this case. The investment in infrastructure, security, and automation of these companies are unprecedented. Not to even mentioning the investments in innovation to continuously improve the reliability, performance, and cost efficiency. Or the evergreening of hardware which go unnoticed thanks to the level of automation. Add to that the telemetry they collect running the cloud infrastructure that they use to train Machine learning models, to optimize resilience for example.

You could argue that you outperform the hyperscale vendor in one domain if you are niche focused, but you cannot do that across the entire spectrum. Yes, you can build and maintain your own IT infrastructure. Maybe you have the money. But why would you spend it on IT? There is a scarcity of IT talent, and why should you focus their energy on commodity? Your key resources must focus on creating new business value. It’s a matter of core and context.

Core is everything that differentiates your business to add business value and win customers. Context is everything else. Public Cloud provides the context. It allows your scarce developers and IT professionals to focus on the core and generate business value.

In a world of Digital transformation, where technology underpins everything in your company, developers (and IT professionals) drive your business value. Public Cloud enables your IT Talent to focus on business value and competitive advantage. Successful companies get another, unexpected benefit. Their current IT staff will stay and you will attract new talent.

Employees were completely motivated to help us move to Azure and adopt new technology, because they saw that as key to their liberation and personal and professional development. And they saw us as an organization that really cares about them.” Capstone

People must be at the center of every Public Cloud Business case. How to make them productive and allow them to focus on the core of your business. This will lead to an increase in speed of your company. It enables more significant ways to optimize costs in your business and will close the -traditional- gap between Business and IT.

No, I am not na?ve here or pushing the case for 100% Public Cloud. In IT the color of grey is predominant. There is no black and white. My take on the future of IT will be a hybrid model with Public Cloud at the center and common architectural principles at the edge.

Start building your business case and Cloud strategy with your people at the center. Be careful though. A poorly executed Cloud Strategy will destroy the productivity of your people and will not drive any business value. For now, Public Cloud is a no brainer