Companies with a cloud-first strategy have learned that the cloud’s real value comes with being able to delegate the Service Level Agreement (SLA) of an entire solution, from infrastructure to application, instead of components. It is also widely recognized that integrated suites reduce complexity, increase reliability and cost less—it’s just that now, with cloud, the suite includes hardware, security and operations. Most agree that the cloud paradigm has cost and convenience benefits: availability, speed, agility and TCO, enabling faster development processes and providing higher reliability and lower risk. Companies that take an ad hoc approach miss out on many of cloud’s benefits and experience a variety of pitfalls.
