Myth Busters: How to Help Your Board Overcome its Fear of Public Cloud

“I’ll lose control of my infrastructure.”

Public cloud partners – at least good ones like Six Degrees – will work in partnership with your organisation, ensuring your unique needs are understood and mapped out as part of a comprehensive migration and hosting plan. And the hyperscale providers are hyper aware of the need to protect customer data while limiting access by default – check out this Microsoft article on Azure customer data protection.

“The move will threaten our in-house IT resources.”

Managed cloud services are designed to complement your organisation’s in-house IT staff and provide them with additional expertise and resources, rather than replacing them. This frees them up to work on strategic activities and protecting your organisation from the risk and exposure of losing key personnel. Check out our Flexible Engineering service to learn how we provide access to named cloud expertise, collaborating with you to deliver iterative, cloud-native, automated, optimised, secure and resilient outcomes in the cloud.

“On-premises infrastructures are more secure.”

We’re sorry, but this one is a bit of a fallacy. You may believe that having your servers sitting in a locked room in your office makes them safer, but the truth is it is extremely difficult for the vast majority of organisations to match the levels of security in-house that they have access to through public cloud. At Six Degrees we take security seriously, and we employ stringent security measures to protect our customers’ data and applications. We support customers’ needs to be compliant with multiple regulations and conduct regular security assessments both for ourselves and on behalf of our customers.

“Public cloud opens us up to lots of additional costs.”

While there may be some additional operational costs associated with moving to public cloud, the long-term cost savings and improved efficiency can more than offset these. Managed cloud services can help your organisation reduce its IT costs by eliminating the need to invest in and maintain expensive on-premises infrastructure, by paying only for the resources you need on an as-needed basis, and through robust FinOps to ensure cloud cost control, governance, and optimisation.

“We’ll lose visibility and transparency into our infrastructure.”

At Six Degrees we deliver visibility and transparency to our managed cloud customers through Service Reviews and reporting. Our customers receive service level agreements and regular reporting that provide transparency into the services provided, proactive recommendations, and the costs associated with them.

“We’ll be too dependent on our public cloud provider.”

This can be a real ‘crossing the Rubicon’ concern for board members hesitant to explore public cloud. Ultimately, it’s important to understand that while a cloud managed service provider like Six Degrees is responsible for managing the day-to-day operations of your organisation’s IT infrastructure, you always maintains control and ownership of your IT environment and can make decisions about the direction of your IT strategy.

It’s all about gaining cloud confidence

When your organisation hosts all of its data and applications on-premises, it can feel like the most sensible – and functional – way to approach workload management. But the truth is, public cloud – or a hybrid cloud combination – can unlock significant business benefits if and when your organisation is ready to consider its position. In this blog we hope we’ve helped you address some of the objections you may come across from your board when you’re taking that first step.

We’ve created a handy infographic that lists the relative benefits of on-premises and cloud hosting, which you can download here. And if you’re ready to speak to one of our experts, it’s really easy to setup a call. Just fill out this simple form and we’ll get back to you to discuss your organisation’s cloud priorities – and how we can help you achieve them.