The 3 dumbest things enterprises do in the cloud – InfoWorld

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Youre going to make mistakes. I tell my enterprise clients that every week.

However, there are mistakes and there are mistakes that are more like self-inflected wounds. Here are three of the dumbest mistakes Im now seeing enterprises make in the cloud efforts.

When helping clients plan their cloud efforts, I regularly hear, My data is sacred, so we dont want to put our data in the cloud. However, were paying too much for compute and datacenter space, so lets place that on some public cloud.

That is not a good move for a couple reasons. First, youre going to hit a great deal of latency. In fact, Ive never seen this kind of hybrid architecture work due to the lags. Second, security becomes way more difficult. In fact, you typically end up with more vulnerabilities.

Enterprises typically change their budgets around the use of public clouds, and publicly traded companies typically dont want to have any upticks in expenses even during transitions. For cloud migrations, they budget for a zero sum game, and to do that they get rid of the staff that looks after the legacy systemsbefore moving the workloads to the public clouds.

Thats a huge mistake. Typically, significant cloud migrations take a year or more. Youre going to need your legacy systems during that time to run the business. So you still need your legacy staff for a good while. Moreover, youre never going to completely get all your applications on the public cloud. Many applications should not move due to their economics, and others cant move due to some limitations in the technology. So you still need some of your legacy staff for the long term. Youll still save, but only over the longer run.

My, how the pendulum has swung! The people in enterprise IT who pushed back on the cloud just a few years ago are now aggressively embracing it. They see the writing on the wall.

But in a hype-driven frenzy, they are overstating the ROI that public cloud computing will bring. As a result, they are falling short in the eyes of the enterprises leadership.

The truth is that the mileage you get from cloud computing varies a great deal. Thats why I spend a great deal of time on the business case to tell enterprises exactly what they can expect. You have to do that, too.

David S. Linthicum is a consultant at Cloud Technology Partners and an internationally recognized industry expert and thought leader. Dave has authored 13 books on computing and also writes regularly for HPE Software's TechBeacon site.

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The 3 dumbest things enterprises do in the cloud - InfoWorld