Cloud decision guide · Canada · EN / FR
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A cloud proposal can make migration sound inevitable before anyone confirms what the workload actually needs, what it costs across a full year, or what happens if the arrangement has to be reversed. Leadership needs a decision frame that survives past the sales conversation.
The decision to enable
Decide which workload moves, on what timeline, under whose ongoing responsibility, and with what exit path—before approving a migration.
Name what the current environment cannot do: handle peak demand, support remote and bilingual teams reliably, survive a site failure, or scale without a hardware purchase. A cloud move is worth evaluating only against a constraint it can plausibly fix.
A monthly subscription figure rarely includes data transfer, integration rework, running two environments in parallel, staff retraining, or the internal hours spent on cutover. Budget the move and the destination separately before comparing totals to the current cost.
Canadian organizations often carry client, employee, or regulatory expectations about where data sits and who can reach it. Ask where data is stored and processed, who at the vendor can access it, and how that access is logged—before signing, not after an incident.
Approval should state which workload moves, what was verified, who accepts operational responsibility afterward, and how data and configuration could be exported if the organization needed to reverse or replace the arrangement.
Decision frame
These criteria do not produce a score. They expose the questions that need resolution before a responsible decision.
Practical scenarios
Situation: An existing line-of-business application is recommended for a complete cloud rebuild rather than a smaller hosting change.
Useful response: Separate the underlying business need from the vendor’s preferred delivery model, and test whether a narrower move meets the same need with less risk and reversible cost.
Boundary: This guide does not evaluate specific cloud platforms or certify a vendor’s technical architecture.
Situation: Email and files already run well in the cloud, and momentum builds to move specialized or older line-of-business systems next.
Useful response: Treat each additional workload as its own fit decision with its own constraint, cost, and exit path, rather than assuming a prior success predicts this one.
Boundary: A working prior migration does not establish fit for every subsequent system.