It’s a harsh reality that, despite allocating millions of dollars toward digital transformation projects, most companies are only seeing marginal returns (if any). Increasingly, you can expect IT leaders to use data for new digital services that will help in driving this transformation. And these new digital services will be built for and deployed in the cloud.

Part of the reason for this high failure rate is not having clarity on what’s required for digital transformation, and of those projects that require transformation, there’s confusion about the best technology strategy to achieve it. Basically, many transformations are led “bottoms up” by adopting new and emerging technologies with a “we got to have some of that” attitude and hoping that somehow that will lead to transformation. This move to the cloud is one such trendy technology-led transformation that organizations are adopting without realizing what it actually entails.

Early cloud solutions lacked the sophistication and maturity to support complex business applications, but over the past few years, there have been advances. Concerns about availability, guarantees of cloud-based services, and data privacy and security have been vastly reduced. Today, the cloud has matured into a reliable, available, flexible, scalable and secure (in a limited way) solution that continues to evolve and improve.

Yet despite its obvious benefits, there are still plenty of cloud myths floating around. Enterprises need to better understand the reality of the cloud versus the myths, especially if they want to drive business initiatives and meet digital transformation goals.  

Myth No. 1: The Cloud Is Easy

“Just take the enterprise stack and move it to the cloud for a job well done.”

Businesses are quick to adopt a cloud-first strategy to deliver innovation faster and adapt to the constant change in business needs and requirements. However, from a database perspective, the benefit of moving to cloud comes from capitalizing on elasticity. This task is not as simple as moving a technology stack to the cloud. Cloud computing enables enhanced elasticity to scale databases horizontally, not just vertically. But if the database can’t leverage that elasticity, then moving from on-premises to the cloud won’t bring a massive improvement in performance. 

“They will manage it, so I don’t need any expertise in-house.”