By now you've heard "the cloud" all over the place, and as a senior IT professional, you've probably come to understand its varied definitions. Using a cloud service to replace data centers is perhaps the hottest topic. A lot of businesses have hemmed and hawed about whether they should adopt this strategy. How do you know if it's right for your midsize business? Before you can answer that question, you have to look at your options.

Buy It or Build It?

You don't have to buy your cloud infrastructure. Your IT team could build it. But of course with that comes asking whether your team can handle the entire infrastructure on their own. Some have speculated that it's best to couple a "home-grown" infrastructure with a third-party one as well. However, this is all entirely dependent on the needs of your business, so there's no need to get carried away just because "it's been said."

The cloud comes in many forms. However, there are three types that are especially popular and perhaps the easiest to manage: The public cloud, where you share bandwidth with other users; a private cloud, where you have your own bandwidth; and a hybrid cloud, which could connect either two private, two public, or a private and a public cloud, as detailed in HighTechDad.

Do You Need It?

The most critical part of deciding if the cloud is right for your business is analyzing your current data center infrastructure. How many outages have you had, and how much has that cost you? According to InformationWeek, an outage costs $5,600 per minute on average. But it's not just about outages, it's about efficiency. What are your cooling and heating system costs? What are your general operation costs? If you're using a colocation data center, what are your service costs? Is it running at top efficiency, or is it making your business bleed time and money? The same way you would "sell" someone on a cloud-based infrastructure is how you decide if you even need to make the switch, in part or entirely. Will the cloud actually solve any problems with the current setup? Obviously if it won't, or if the costs outweigh the benefits, there's no real reason to switch.

That being said, you don't have to go all out to reap the benefits of the cloud. You can do a partial switch, only "outsourcing" certain services and keeping others "local"; for instance, you could keep payroll information on your servers while keeping customer acquisitions statistics in a cloud server. However, depending on how you manage that dynamic, it could be more costly than just having one or the other.

There's no reason to "fear" cloud operations. The system is well established and allows for enough control on your part that you can tailor it to your needs. There are many factors you have to consider. How much security do you need? How well does your current setup serve you? Can you save money by switching? Is your hardware running out of life? There isn't one answer for every midsize business. All that is definite is yes, some will greatly benefit from the cloud, while others might not, or at least not enough to justify switching.

Yes, it has great potential to cut costs. Yes, it has potential to be more manageable. Yes, it has potential to increase efficiency. But you can only know if it's right by asking yourself these questions and comparing what you'd get from the cloud against what you would potentially replace.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.