There’s been a lot of online talk lately about the true benefits of migrating company resources to the Cloud, particularly services hosted in the Cloud using a Cloud provider.  Even Gartner has thrown their hat into the ring recently suggesting that its smarter and actually more cost-effective to build your own datacenter than to host.  What?  You can build your own datacenter cheaper than migrate your resources to a hosting company?

A report released recently, CSC, “The Cloud Usage Index” report, also suggests that, while there are defined benefits of a Cloud model, its not always about cost savings.

Here’s a telling piece from the report:

23 percent of all U.S. organizations and 45 percent of U.S. organizations with fewer than 50 employees report no savings.

Once again, it seems, our organizations are being led into decision-making by marketing tactics and possibly not real information.  The Cloud will get better, no question.  As we continue to migrate, the cost issue will have to be addressed.  Right now, cost is not regulated.  Its more like your cable TV service than your energy provider, where they raise the price a bit all the time and won’t tell you about it.

But, what are the benefits to migrating, if cost is not a gain?  Read through the report when you get a chance, but here’s a few bulleted highlights:

• 33% of survey respondents cited accessibility to information through multiple devices as the most important reason for their decision to adopt cloud computing
• 48% of U.S. government agencies moved at least one workflow to the cloud following the new requirement that U.S. federal agencies adopt a “cloud-first” policy
• 88% of Australian companies see improvement in their IT departments since adoption of cloud
• 84% of Japanese companies say cloud has reduced waste and energy consumption

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