This article was originally published in Mint.

Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle believe India’s cloud opportunity is no walk in the clouds but very real indeed as companies change their business models and adapt to a digital world. Yet, in India and the rest of the world, if everyone in business understands benefits of moving their IT workloads to the cloud—faster time to market, more flexible systems, streamlined application development and lower data centre costs—why are so many dragging their feet?

Bain’s recent survey of more than 400 companies, including leading global technology firms, found they put only about 18% of their workloads in the cloud today on average. The most serious ones aim to put about half their workload there—but even these leaders could run IT differently to get more savings from the cloud.

People hesitate in the face of big change, and executives are no different. Many put off a daunting task like shifting half their workload from traditional on-site servers to the cloud because they don’t have time to manage the change. Others worry about data security—though the record of breaches over the past few years suggests that data stored in the public cloud is at no greater risk than data stored on private servers.

Some companies move piecemeal into the cloud without a broader strategy for big savings: a business unit buys a SaaS application or an infrastructure group adopts a private or hybrid cloud solution.

A better way is to develop a more comprehensive picture of what’s possible by looking at the whole technology landscape, including current architecture, workload costs and future requirements. Then come up with a framework that identifies which workloads are most suitable for the cloud, taking into account unique industry constraints like security or other compliance issues.

Read the full article in Mint.