The Cloud – Many Hidden Benefits
If you are planning to move to the cloud business plan 
is the first step and often a requirement for most organizations. That plan will contain expected outcomes. The success of the move to the cloud will then be judged by if those outcomes materialize. In this post we explore what most organizations put into those plans.
The post takes a look at the unexpected outcomes organizations, that have jumped to the cloud, are seeing they did not include in their original plans. Lets call those the hidden benefits of the cloud.
The general expected outcomes
Almost every company starts their journey looking into the cloud as a money saving exercise. 
This makes sense as it is rare for investment to happen without some payback expectation. Investments in the cloud are no different.
Costs organizations generally factor into that business case, that they hope cloud can help with, can include many things but often these 4 are always present:
- New hardware capital expenditure as things scale.
- Maintenance capital expenditure around existing hardware (including any extended or special warranties).
- Operational expenditure around running a physical location (buildings, cooling, electricity and more) – could also be a capital expenditure if they have to buy the property outright.
- Capital and/or operational expenditure focused on support and maintenance of parts of the software stack (applying hotfixes, having access to technical support etc).
Of the business cases I have recently seen the majority focus 90% on some aspect of cost. No doubt, cost is a great start point but it should not be where you end. There are other things that organizations should consider!
What about unexpected outcomes?
To identify hidden benefits, that you may want to factor into your cloud business case, Microsoft ran a survey of organizations that have adopted the cloud. They asked: “What benefits they are seeing from the cloud including things they did not include in their original plan”. Below is a graphic showing the core outcomes of that survey!
Looking closely at the results they include things such as:
- Being able to adopt and try new technology more quickly (new found IT agility).
- Reduced delivery times (time to market).
- Improved security.
I will focus in on one of them here – Security. Mostly because it is the one I would never have thought to include previously.
A closer look at security
Before I worked more closely with companies who have adopted the cloud I would not have included security in my business cases for moving to the cloud. It does, however, make a great deal of sense to do so. This is especially true in this evolving digital age where great harm can be done as a result of a variety of security breaches.
As a cloud provider security is a top concern. To show that many have gone to great lengths to gain an incredible number of certifications to specific standards. Those focused on security go from physical site security, to data security and right through to cyber security. With their global collection of security experts, who are constantly working on your behalf to identify threats and resolve them, cloud providers are leading the security fight. This level of expertise, coverage and ability to respond is very hard to create with an on premise operation. Fundamentally security is built into the cloud, with costs distributed, whereas if you are on premise this is something you are having to deal with and pay for mostly alone.
Cloud Security Example
This became clear to me when listening to a customer describe their cloud journey recently to a number of organizations thinking to adopt the cloud.
The organization in question had moved a number of virtual machines into the cloud. It was an initial lift and shift movement of part of their infrastructure. If you like the first phase of their cloud journey.
Everything was running great. After a few months they got a call from the Microsoft security. 
In that call they were told that 2 of those virtual machines were experiencing unexpected amounts of traffic. They were under attack. The security center of Microsoft picked up this abnormal activity and proactively informed the customer who could decide what action to take. The customer commented that prior to moving into the cloud they would never have been able to detect that. Just one simple example of cloud security in action protecting your organization and assets.
Unexpected benefits abound
There are many other unexpected benefits, the Microsoft Survey highlighted just a few, when moving to the cloud. If your organization is thinking about building a cloud business case then it needs to contain reference to the unexpected benefits others are experiencing to capture the full potential of the investment.
This was the 4th post in this series. The others are:
- Cloud – Are You Already Falling Behind?
- Quantifying Cloud Adoption – Is It Really Happening?
- Where should you start your cloud journey?
I look forward to your feedback.
Although I work for Microsoft these thoughts are 100% my own & may not reflect the views of my employer.