Many On-Ramps To The Cloud Highway

There's so much talk about moving to the cloud that the many radically different paths to adoption get lost on some in the IT channel and corporate IT leaders.

But IT pros need to remember this: "The cloud isn't one thing that users either turn on or off, move to or don't," said Gerardo Dada, vice president of product marketing at SolarWinds, of Austin, Texas, a developer of IT management software.

It's crucial to choose the right path, Dada said, and that means partners should think about the requirements of the workload, and not the cost.

Dada routinely sees SolarWinds customers at various stages of the cloud journey grappling with those decisions, from MSPs to small businesses to enterprise and government customers.

"The assumption is that almost every workload will be impacted by the cloud in some way," Dada said. "Even if you do nothing, most companies will still be using cloud for something."

The following detail seven paths to cloud adoption, each with pros and cons, and potentially more useful for some workloads than others. The channel must help companies keep their eyes open as they make that journey, fully understanding the potential benefits, and the challenges they’ll have to overcome, Dada said.