Watch the storage, not the compute
When it comes to the cloud, pay attention to the data. Moving data into the cloud is hard. Getting it back is harder, particularly if your cloud service provider goes out of business on short notice.
Also pay attention to concentrations of risk. It's no big deal if some archive you rarely need access to is offline for a week. On the other hand, a big bank or trading firm would be put out of business by an outage that long, and prepares accordingly. Remember Amazon's outage a few years back, when a network partition within the piece of a data center which held a lot of customer data suddenly caused essentially all of the computers holding that data to think they were the last surviving copy, each then attempting at very high priority to copy itself?
I've often said it takes a decade to establish a new server to storage connection, and at least two decades for a server to storage connection to fade away once a replacement technology reaches critical mass. In the cloud, that connection is an API ecosystem like S3, not a nominally hardware centered ecosystem like Fibre Channel. My point is not these details, it's that it would take decades to migrate all of enterprise IT to the cloud, even if the cloud were provably a better business choice today.
That is not to say the the cloud hasn't captured 100% of a new generation of applications, and some existing corporate IT as well. Shifts like this in customer choices were the nature of the technology world when IBM brought the System/360 mainframe to market 50 years ago, when Digital introduced the VAX series a little under 40 years ago, when Compaq created the plug-compatible, software compatible PC 30 years ago, when Fibre Channel was introduced 20 years ago, and so on. Most of the time customers figure out where the new technology makes the most sense, where the older technology makes the most sense, and the market evolves accordingly over a period of years (sometimes even decades).
Back to the point: watch the data. If corporate customers (small, medium, and large) start moving all their data to the cloud, the compute can follow (the compute is the easy part).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
