CIO OPINION
Handing the infrastructure reins to a cloud provider is simply a no-brainer . We don ’ t need to worry about IT hardware anymore .
Ben Waterhouse , CIO at Coates . Photo by Chris Pavlich / The Photo Pitch .
Let ’ s not overthink this : why it ’ s best to hand the reins to cloud providers
Ben Waterhouse , CIO at Coates , a leading Australian construction equipment and hire business , has recently led the company ’ s Digital Transformation . He tells Intelligent CIO businesses are underselling the benefits of cloud when considering TCO and details what he learned about cloud along the journey .
The cloud hype cycle reached its zenith not long ago , but its popularity has started to fall among many of my fellow CIOs across the country . One of the main complaints about cloud – aside from potential latency and the risk of outages – is the price , which not only goes from a CAPEX to OPEX expense but for many seems to cost more in the long run , for a perception they ’ re receiving less .
Many seem to think that they ’ re best off reverting , at least in some form , to hosting applications onpremise themselves .
This line of thinking forgets the simple fact that these cloud hyperscalers have made billions doing this kind of thing as a prime business offering . They ’ ve invested just as much in making their infrastructure robust and constantly available , and the economies of scale ensure they can offer more bandwidth , more redundancy , lower latency and greater reliability than we could possibly fathom in keeping our systems onprem or at the branch headquarters .
How did we reach a point where we thought we could ‘ do cloud ’ better than cloud ?
Along the journey to the cloud – and if you ’ re reading this you ’ ve used it or considered it for your business – we began looking too closely at costs and somehow misinterpreting them . We originally rushed to the cloud because no longer did we have to pay huge CAPEX for
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