Business cases are now driving a more sophisticated view of cloud adoption, one that asks: Does moving this system to the cloud make good business sense? Are the long-term benefits worth the costs of re-engineering processes or redesigning the architecture? This pragmatic approach maximizes flexibility and minimizes cloud vendor lock-in.
What government needs to know
Like private organizations, many governments also wholeheartedly embraced a cloud-first policy. However, it has become evident that an overzealous focus on the cloud for all use cases doesn’t necessarily lead to success. The moment of reckoning has come, and both policymakers and government IT leaders recognize that intelligent decisions about cloud adoption must be guided by business value rather than hype. There, I said it.
Governments have realized that simply mandating cloud migration is not a magic bullet. They must evaluate their IT portfolios case-by-case, considering technical, financial, and strategic factors. Many criteria must be evaluated before a workload is declared a good fit for the cloud. Repatriation is common within government agencies, a normal response to moving the wrong workloads and data to the cloud. Many of the workloads initially migrated to the cloud are far too expensive to exist in a public cloud provider and should be moved back to other solutions, such as private clouds, traditional on-prem, managed services providers, or colocation providers.
