Three weeks ago, Microsoft released the next phase of Azure.  I have had several clients waiting on this release.  The fact that they have been waiting and are now more receptive to looking at the cloud. 

Customers expressed fear of the unknown.  And a fear of lack of control, even when that lack of control also means a huge degree of flexibility to innovate with concerns about the underlying infrastructure.  I think IaaS will be that “gateway drug” to get customers who have been hesitant to take another look at the cloud.  The dialog can change from the cloud being this big scary unknown to a resource for workloads.  The conversations should have always been, and can know be even stronger, geared toward the following points:

1) The cloud is not unicorns and glitter, the cloud is resources.  Compute, storage, db’s, services bus, cache…..  Like many of the resources we have on-premise.  Not magic, just another resource with advantages and obstacles like any other resource.

2) The cloud should be part of the conversation for any new project.  All of the same criteria should be applied, on-premise or off.  Cost, security, reliability, scalability, speed to deploy, cost of licenses, need to customize image, complex workloads.  We have been having these discussions for years when we talk about on-premise projects.  We make decisions on OS’s, Databases, ESB’s, configuration and products based on a myriad of factors.  We use the same factors but now we have a additional set of resources to consider in our process.

3) The cloud is a great solution looking for some interesting problems.  It is our job to recognize the right problems that fit into the cloud, weigh the factors and decide what to do.

IaaS makes this discussion easier, offers more choices, and often choices that many enterprises will find more better than PaaS.  Looking forward to helping clients realize the power of the cloud.