There are a lot of good reasons why you should move to the CLOUD. You are sending a lot of your physical environment (building, security, atmosphere controls, redundancy of power etc.) and the hardware care to someone else for a significant cost savings. Keeping up with the new hardware technology not to mention the licensing costs, (now software maintenance licensing for the hardware) and then add in the 24 x 7 coverage of the hardware watchers. There are other things that are just plain easier, setting up DR so you can roll up from one coast to another in literally minutes if you need to during a natural or other disaster. Setting up Always on or Replication services is so much easier because the equipment can be set up to be identical with ease.
Not to mention that you need less staff to do a lot of the maintenance and many things can be automated.
Automated is where you discover the differences. You can set things up so you can auto grow your disk space but what if you only needed this space temporarily well, we have found it is hard to ramp back down. You can’t resell or re-use that storage space it has been assigned and you are stuck with it. It harder to add third party tools for things, if you want a configuration of something that requires some customization it can be downright stressful if not impossible because you are at the mercy of their service offerings and how they package and price what you need. One month the tool you are using can be free the next month a small fee which grows exponentially with no notice. If you want something like say an IP Detection service added to the environment. In some cloud offerings this is inside a host of security products that you might not want to pay for, but this one service would solve an issue for you. You are the mercy of staff that may not be well trained or ill equipped to understand your issues. So, you may not purchase something you really need, or you may overpay for things you simply don’t want. The billing issues are so complicated that the distributors can’t explain the bills. In a few months’ time your bill can double without you knowing what changes in your configuration caused the growth.
However, you can go back to calculate what you would spend on ON-PREM and you still might have an ROI to be proud of by deciding to make the move to the CLOUD. You must also understand that ON-PREM you were the only fish in the pond now you are a small fish in a very large ocean and the old do what it takes to get it right is now tempered with a lot of patience self-control or bring your checkbook. Overall, we are happy we moved to the CLOUD but there are moments when you think man this was easier when we were in complete control. We could say when, who and how much. Now we just say OK, how much.
