Vivek - for startups in particular, the cloud is a great springboard for your business. AWS provides compute, storage and a number of standard enterprise applications in the cloud. So, that dev, test and prod environment can be up and running quickly. However, you do need to keep an eye on costs. Cloud isn't a panacea and in some cases, running in the cloud can be more expensive long term than having your own devices.

Cloud can also augment your existing platform if capacity is required to quickly deliver or deal with a large data processing activity (for example). If you have a platform based on a horizontally scaling architecture then bursting into the cloud to provide performance at short notice can be great with dealing with unexpected or short term high demand.

You also need to give consideration to the types of cloud instances you need, the sizes of those instances and determine when you need to start them up and bring them down. Enterprises money by not sizing instances correctly or not switching off instances.

Effective capacity planning and predicting is vital to keep on top of potentially spiralling and uncontrolled costs of cloud services.