Why Morningstar Moved to the Cloud: 97% Cost Reduction

Enterprises won't move to the cloud. If they do, it's tantamount to admitting your IT group sucks. That has been the common wisdom. Morningstar, an investment research provider, is moving to the cloud and they're about as enterprisey as it gets. And they don't strike me as incompetent, it just seems they don't want to worry about all the low level IT stuff anymore.
Mitch Shue, Morningstar's CTO, gave a short talk at AWS Summit Series 2017 on their move to AWS. It's not full of nitty gritty technical details. That's not the interesting part. The talk is more about their motivations, the process they used to make the move, and some of the results they've experienced. While that's more interesting, we've heard a lot of it before.
What I found most interesting was the idea of Morningstar as a canary test. If Morningstar succeeds, the damn might bust and we'll see a lot more adoption of the cloud by stodgy mainstream enterprises. It's a copy cat world. That sort of precedent gives other CTOs the cover they need to make the same decision.
The most important idea in the whole talk: the cost savings of moving to Continue reading
Both challenges are seen as boring and basic, but significant for enterprises.