Infrastructure is where the public cloud model can offer the biggest benefit for startups. Public clouds allow startups to spin up their businesses quickly without eating into smaller cash flows by wasting dollars on building their own internal IT infrastructures.
Some employees may be using the cloud right now without even knowing. This represents a hidden "iceberg" of cost, where employees may be spending their organization’s money on virtual machines (VMs) with providers like Amazon EC2. This not only circumvents the standard operating procedures of many organizations but also their accounting and auditing systems as well.
But there is an unhealthy assumption that by merely adopting a public cloud strategy, organizations will automatically save money. This is not necessarily true.
For two major reasons – to guarantee that commercially sensitive content remains private and to ensure the application of proper accountancy practices -- it may be time for organizations to legitimize public cloud for certain types of work. Costs will be incurred, but they should not be hidden from the business like a dirty little secret.
