How to Build a Cloud Business Case

If your cloud business case focuses only on cost savings, you're setting yourself up to fail. Many cloud migrations have been approved on cost promises and then considered failures when the first year's bills came in higher than expected.

The Cost Savings Trap

Yes, the cloud can reduce costs. But not immediately, and not automatically:

• Migration has upfront costs (assessment, planning, execution, training)
• Cloud-native architectures require new skills and often new tools
• Until you optimize consumption, cloud bills often exceed data center costs
• The learning curve means inefficiency in the early months

Organizations that promise 30% cost savings in year one often find themselves explaining overruns in year two. The savings come eventually, but they come from optimization, not from migration itself.

The Stronger Business Case

The stronger business case centers on capabilities. What can you do in the cloud that you can't do today?

Speed to market. How long does it take to provision infrastructure for a new project today? Weeks? Months? In the cloud, it's minutes. What's that speed worth in competitive advantage?

Scalability. Can your current infrastructure handle 10x traffic? 100x? Cloud elasticity means you don't need to guess demand - you respond to it.

Access to innovation. Machine learning, advanced analytics, IoT platforms, serverless computing. These capabilities would take years to build internally. In the cloud, they're API calls away.

Operational resilience. Multi-region redundancy, automated failover, global load balancing. Building this on-premises requires massive investment. Cloud providers offer it as a standard feature.

Quantify the Status Quo

The most compelling business cases quantify what the current state actually costs:

Lost revenue from outages. What does an hour of downtime cost? How many hours of downtime did you have last year?

Opportunity cost of slow provisioning. How many projects are delayed waiting for infrastructure? What's the revenue impact of getting to market three months later?

Maintenance burden. What percentage of IT spending goes to keeping the lights on versus innovation? What could you build if that ratio changed?

Technical debt. What does it cost to maintain aging systems? What's the risk of systems that nobody understands anymore?

Frame It as Business Investment

Executives don't care about compute hours. They care about speed to market, operational resilience, and competitive positioning. Frame the cloud as a business investment, not an IT expense.

The CFO doesn't need to understand Kubernetes. They need to understand that cloud adoption enables the business strategy. Connect cloud capabilities to business outcomes that matter to stakeholders.

Real examples help make the case. See what banks taught me about cloud adoption for patterns from financial institutions.