Cartoon by David Fletcher – http://www.gocomics.com/crumb

Lots of folks are happy to explain how moving to the cloud can save a company money. It’s certainly a selling point and not to be ignored. But is it really all about cost?

Here’s five benefits to the cloud that have nothing to do with IT costs.

(1) Agility: You can change solutions easily if a better one pops up or you chose the wrong one in the first place.

(2) Quality: It’s really hard to run ops as well as the best cloud vendors. They simply have amazing resources to devote to their ops infrastructure.

(3) Security: Many folks will disagree with me on this, but a build-once, use-many-times system is more secure than a build-once, use-once service. See CIA comments in “Cloud is More Secure than Traditional Approaches”.

(4) Scale: If you design your app with the cloud in mind you can just turn up a dial really quickly when you need it. And down when you don’t. Pinterest scaled to 18 million users without needing to buy a server or build an ops team.

(5) Bandwidth: The most precious thing is human talent. It’s hard to find, expensive to acquire and incredibly powerful when applied properly. So why spend it on something that doesn’t bring a compelling advantage to your enterprise? With the cloud you can apply more of your finite time & talent to building your core product instead of deploying Ubuntu.