I find the cloud in 2020 to be very interesting. I run into plenty of technical professionals that still dismiss it or think that moving to the cloud is a recipe for disaster. They are sure their internal systems are better, more cost effective, and better built than anything a cloud vendor can sell their organization.

They might be right. I do think that this can be true.

I also think that the cloud is a fairly unstoppable trend for the world, so you better be able to answer Brent's question: what do you do better than the cloud? Even if your company isn't planning on moving or pushing you to think about it, this could be a good exercise. In fact, it might be a fun team building exercise over lunch or on a late Friday afternoon when things are slow.

It does mean that you need to learn something about the cloud, which is a very nebulous term. There are IaaS and PaaS services, lots of networking options, plenty of automated tasks built in and even more services available that you might ever want to install. There is also very confusing pricing, limited hardware choices, and a feature mix that could be different from what's available on premises.

The cloud gives you lots of flexibility in some ways, and little in others. Vendors provide certifications and instrumentation and logging that you might not want to build. Or maybe you've built it already. What equipment or contracts that you have might not be cost effective to change now, but when you think about renewing or replacing them, you might have a much different view.

I can almost guarantee that your management, especially finance, will think about this differently than you do.

Depending on what I'm doing, I think the cloud is either amazing or maddening. Some of that is me, and some is truly the cloud and how I use it. You can beat the cloud vendors, but you might not want to. If you do, be prepared to prove it.