The IT upgrade cycle implies significant outlay in both capital expenditure and time. The cloud promises to reduce both of these while also introducing a new flexibility to the organisation’s ICT.

Maintaining a large heterogeneous on-premise infrastructure means that changes to any one part instantly spawn a string of related tasks and costs. For example, a software patch can trigger a hardware upgrade, raise issues about server, network and backup/recovery capacity, require a review of software licensing and maintenance contracts and have knock-on effects in terms of compliance with data security regulations.

This in turn leads to the CIO having to fight for an extraordinary capital expenditure increase and ties up management time. All in-house systems are involved in this enmeshed co-dependence, from the data centre to the desktop estate, from the PBX to branch office servers.

The true cost of the upgrade cycle needs to be properly considered to understand the real total cost of ownership of in-house IT and to evaluate the business case for in-house versus fully outsourced.