Successful cloud adoption: It’s the fit, stupid

InfoWorld’s IT advice columnist Bob Lewis reached out to me last week after my blog post “How AWS can conquer enterprise IT’s resistance to public clouds” with a few ideas. He suggested we should take a page out of the early PC and Web playbooks to help readers understand how to match up the new technology with the old problems. For example, we could use Amazon Web Services — or any cloud computing technology — to address business problems that would be impractical to deploy on traditional IT platforms.

Indeed, cloud computing providers tend to push their technology as the solution to any and all business problems. Unfortunately, there is not a universal fit for cloud computing technology, so you have to be careful to match the business problem you’re looking to solve with the technology that best addresses it. To paraphrase James Carville, the political strategist for former President Bill Clinton, it’s the fit, stupid.