How Cloud Decisions Are Made

A cloud decision is a business decision

Choosing to move a system to the cloud, or to buy a new cloud service, is rarely a purely technical choice. It changes cost patterns, risk, skills, contracts and how quickly the business can change. A decision made only by the infrastructure team often fails later because finance, security or the business owner were not involved.

In this course you will move from the concepts of cloud computing to the practical choices: which service to use, how to secure and govern it, how to pay for it, and how to keep it running. Each module builds on the one before it.

The parts of a sound business case

1. The problem or opportunity. What is not working today, or what the business wants to do.
2. Options. At least two, including "do nothing" or "improve what we have".
3. Total cost of ownership. All costs over three to five years, not only the monthly bill: migration effort, training, running both environments in parallel, support and licences.
4. Benefits. Measurable where possible: time to deliver a change, hours of downtime, staff time saved.
5. Risks and how they will be managed. Security, lock-in, skills, data residency.
6. A recommendation and a first step. Often a small pilot rather than a full commitment.

Two cases

Case 1: the rushed decision. A distribution company's operations director signs up for a cloud warehouse management service after a sales demonstration. Six months later, the finance team finds that data storage and integration costs were not in the quote, and the security team finds that user accounts are not linked to the company directory. Both problems were avoidable with a short review by finance and security before signing.

Case 2: the pilot first. A regional engineering firm wants to move its document management system. It runs a three-month pilot with one department, measures search times and monthly cost, and tests a restore from backup. The pilot shows real benefits and one problem with large drawing files, which is fixed before the full move.