How to build a business case for cloud migration

Vendors are pushing the cloud now more than ever, but migrating to it involves far more than simply turning on a switch. Enterprises need clear, logical business reasons for moving beyond the public platform they're utilizing today.

For enterprises wavering on whether to bite the bullet and move their data center workloads into a public cloud, it's easy enough to see the benefits:

Cost reduction: Many cloud services are priced on a "pay as you go" basis, with no upfront hardware costs and pay-for-what-you-use pricing. This is appealing for any business looking to reduce expenses without sacrificing service quality or uptime.

Security: Cloud providers such as Google and Microsoft (i.e Confidential Computing) have a significant investment in providing comprehensive security for their customers. Security professionals at the largest enterprises know this, even if they don't want to admit it .

Mobility: IT administrators often remark that employees working from home slow the network to a crawl thanks to massive downloads of music, movies and other files from sites like BitTorrent. This is less of an issue in a VDI environment running in a public cloud, where data transfer is between your organization and the cloud provider and not from your employees' home computers to their work machines.

While these benefits are real and substantial, there's still significant planning involved in any sort of application or workload migration; this is why IT organizations typically begin their cloud projects with small tasks and progressively roll out more complex ones.

Few organizations can afford to simply "flip a switch" and move all of their data center workloads onto the public cloud – at least not without first ensuring that the new environment has been properly provisioned, secured and tested. Enterprises must be prepared for an initial period of increased costs and headaches as they ramp up to scalable workloads – but this short-term pain will be rewarded with long-term benefits once the dust settles.

One important task, though frequently overlooked, is detailing a business case that justifies any sort of migration to the public cloud. While there are numerous "pros" to migrating public cloud, most of them are subjective and intangible. If you're hoping to use these benefits as part of your business case for moving workloads out of your data center and into the cloud, you'll need concrete evidence to back up your argument.

After all, not every organization can afford (or justify) spending even more money on a project that won't provide immediate and measurable returns.