- Performance and scalability - If a CIO thinks that one cannot move to cloud and be as scalable and high performing, I have to say that he/she needs to be educated on some of the fundamentals on cloud computing. Auto-scaling (Up and Down) automatically - THE biggest asset! How can someone prefer leaving their infrastructure idle or shutting down services to provide more server resources in case the demand peaks to take the Autoscaling opportunity provided by cloud providers such as AWS?? Scientific researchers, NASA live telecast from MARS Rover, banking industries, blue chips companies - please - they all are in cloud albeit hybrid model but they are and dont say that their cloud infrastructure is not performing as good.
- Infrastructure "Type" - Really?? At the end of the day do you want "T5", IBM XIV, Solaris BLADE, etc etc or you are looking for the same PERFORMANCE?? Are you really looking for managing those infrastructure no matter how many times you have to have the outages or do you want highly scalable, available and durable infrastructure with bare minimum utility based costing model - NO MATTER WHETHER THEY RUN YOUR SERVICES ON CHEAP INFRASTRUCTURE! Do you really care??
- Security - Funny! Its one of the MAIN reasons moving to the cloud. The level of security AWS can provide, pretty much impossible to achieve unless you move away from your CORE business which may be selling a product and just manage secure infrastructure :) Please read 100s of pages from AWS Security White Paper - Each and Every service is SECURE - aside from app level and firewall rules level security that the coimpanies will provide on top!
From what I can understand, companies will gradually move away from on-premise infrastrucure ONLY when they will see their competitors gaining extra-ordinary advantage all of a sudden, but Alas! it might already have been late move from them. The whole idea is NOT TO WORRY ABOUT your infrastrcture - that takes MOST of your IT time, resources and money and FOCUS on your CORE business, develop new services, products, deploy them within seconds for your customers, add more agility in your IT environment. Make your infrastrucure more secure, scalable, available with multi zone DR planning already in place within minutes if not seconds. Compare this with on-premise infrastructure maintainance - Dealing with vendors, upgrading Oracle, paying millions (Even for idle infrastructure), waiting for approval - rings a bell??
