Using the Cloud can significantly speed up the server provisioning cycle.

It used to take about 3 months for us to move from proposal to in-use server, but after out move to AWS last year this is now about 2 - 3 days. The technical bits of this typically take under 1 day, but there are those pesky approvals to get done.

This change in speed has forced a change of thinking on us. Cost management of server spend used to get buried in the Capex process for getting new servers. Removing the Capex process initially resulted in cost management becoming an orphan that no-one properly looked after.

We have now moved to making the Operations Team responsible for budget management for server costs, resulting in KPIs around this for the Windows System people. Moving to the Cloud gives some interesting new opportunities, but also some new challenges to overcome.