Why do organisations migrate to the public cloud? This blog for Cloud Security Alliance, by cloud and information security architect, Eyal Estrin, was written in 2025, and it may sound like a simple question, but it’s not as simple as it sounds. Here, is an abridged version of the piece, and you can find a link to the whole blog, below.
“Historically, the cost factor has been a major driving force. For many traditional organisations, it began with the debate of how to lower the cost of their IT budget.
“Variable purchase options for consuming services (from pay-as-you-go, saving plans, to Spot) and the ability to easily deploy an entire environment in a few clicks (or a few API calls) looked very appealing.
“It was so appealing that many organisations (from small startups to large enterprises) forgot to embed cost as part of their design decisions, which ended up in large monthly bills. After migrating data and workloads to the public cloud, they are now debating cloud repatriation and going back to on-prem.
“Rushing to the cloud without proper design and without looking at all aspects (from security, scalability, availability, and cost) ended up with failed projects.
“Mature organisations with experienced teams (from developers, DevOps, architects, etc.) are able to design modern architectures based on a combination of managed services, APIs, and serverless services, which may be cost-efficient and able to save money on cloud services. However, for most organizations still taking their first steps in the cloud, or those that lack experienced teams, migrating to the cloud will very likely end up as a major disappointment when just looking at the cost factor.”
The Factors that matter in 2025
“The Agility Factor, The Scalability Factor, The Elasticity Factor, The Efficiency Factor, The Automation Factor, and finally, The Security Factor.
Summary
In his blog post, Estrin has tried to answer the question of why organisations are migrating to the public cloud.
“There are many cases where organisations will choose to keep some of their workloads on-prem (or in co-location or hosting facilities) due to high service costs (from real-time storage to expensive hardware such as GPUs), requirements for low network latency (such as connectivity to stock exchange), or data sovereignty requirements.
“We will probably still see hybrid architectures for many years, but there is no doubt that the public cloud takes more and more importance in the design and architecture decisions of organisations of all sizes.
“If we stop looking at the public cloud as a place to lower our costs (it is possible, but not for all use cases) and if we start looking at agility, scalability, elasticity, efficiency, automation, and built-in security (enabled by default) as important factors, we see the answer to the question of why organisations are migrating to the public cloud.”
Read the full blog, here
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