'The cloud was seen as a silver bullet, but there is never just one solution that fixes everything': Richard Hilton

The first couple of years using the cloud will have looked like cost savings, through reducing the number of staff needed, and freeing up space from having servers onsite. However, now we are three to four years in, the true costs are becoming apparent and the CFO’s who made the call to change to the cloud only will have moved on.

IT is generally seen as a necessary evil or a cost centre in a company, when it should be at the very core, because without it you wouldn’t have a business. Not prioritising your IT you might as well be Blockbusters in a Netflix world. The technical shift towards the cloud however was misleading, but companies put their faith in what they were being sold.

Technology to a degree has replaced religion, with everyone flocking to the next best thing and not wanting to miss out. The cloud was seen as a silver bullet, but there is never just one solution that fixes everything in IT, and as people realise the cloud longer term is not meeting their expectations, the costs of changing back are often prohibitive to being able to.

The reduction in servers onsite was also seen as ticking a green box for sustainability and reducing the carbon footprint for a company, but the servers needed to host the cloud are immense.

The benefits the cloud provides are still there, however you are effectively trusting all your company information to an external source, and as such losing an element of control.

Debates are also rife relating to the location of the cloud and ownership of the data saved there. With the majority of organisations using the three giants Amazon, Google and Microsoft, including our own government, it is quite a scary prospect that a significant amount of this data is stored outside the UK.

Data repatriation is growing and will be the next biggest thing, as ownership of the data and soaring costs continue to escalate. Is there an alternative? There are UK clouds, available through many companies, including our own Sovereign cloud.

But how many companies properly think through why they want to use cloud facilities, rather than just following the crowd and moving data over.

Consider why you want to use it first and utilise it in a way that lets you use its benefits and agility to get the most value for your business. Evaluate if all your data should be moved, or some kept in house. Companies are having ‘cloud first’ policies, without fully understanding it. What they should be doing is ‘cloud considered’, and ensuring they have combined systems, so they are not entrusting everything to one source.

Fully evaluate the costs, particularly costs of moving the data back, so that should that need to happen, the reality of the costs isn’t such a shock as many companies are finding.

Richard Hilton is private sector chief security officer at Claritas Solutions.