In numerous conversations recently with CIOs, IT Architects, and even major international consulting groups, it’s been surprising and frankly disappointing to me to just how scared a lot of people are about migrating to the cloud or recommending it to their clients. Sure, there are issues and I’m not recommending you stupidly sign up and don’t think about all the right buying criteria, etc., but GET ON WITH IT.

Many cloud providers have solution sets much more sophisticated and easier to deploy than our traditional central IT environments.  Not to mention, the pricing, service levels and contracts with these providers allow you to easily communicate the cost of change and higher service levels with your constituents. It seems in the past, our internal buyers would balk as we tried to share true costs of higher service levels and what they perceived to be “simple.” I’m not for abdicating your responsibility to train on the cost and value of IT. But it’s also been surprising to me when I see a number of IT executives eyes opening wide at the granularity of pricing for changes by some IaaS and PaaS providers.  This surprise just underscores how many of us in IT management are not communicating the true cost of change to our customers (maybe we don’t know it?)