The above mentioned security. The workload, which has two spikes in January and April, moderate traffic in between and is basically non-existent April through December is pretty much the poster child for cloud since you could spin down capacity in the 8 months where you don't see much traffic. This is why Intuit has publicly stated that they want to go all in on AWS. But, at least when I was there, the internal security teams were making it very difficult to get cloud deployments approved. I know they were working closely with Amazon engineers to fix/design solutions to the gating security concerns, but I have no idea how far they've gotten.
But when you look at the money involved, you can see why Intuit is moving so slowly and is willing to continue to spend on its own data center. $40m/yr may sound like a lot of money, but when your product pulls in $3b/yr, it's a rounding error. And the data centers aren't dedicated to TurboTax...Quickbooks and a few other products run there too. And I have to say that, for certain services, I think you get a lot of piece of mind from not sharing and having your own data center. Take, for example, Intuit's service for scraping data from financial institutions (FICDS). It powers Mint, Quickbooks and TurboTax and is required to store login credentials for people's banks, retirement accounts, brokerage accounts and such. Needless to say, the security of such a service is paramount and there's no way that I'd ever entrust my banking credentials to any service hosted in the cloud. You just can't get the same level of security you can get when you've got physical control over your hosting.
But when you look at the money involved, you can see why Intuit is moving so slowly and is willing to continue to spend on its own data center. $40m/yr may sound like a lot of money, but when your product pulls in $3b/yr, it's a rounding error. And the data centers aren't dedicated to TurboTax...Quickbooks and a few other products run there too. And I have to say that, for certain services, I think you get a lot of piece of mind from not sharing and having your own data center. Take, for example, Intuit's service for scraping data from financial institutions (FICDS). It powers Mint, Quickbooks and TurboTax and is required to store login credentials for people's banks, retirement accounts, brokerage accounts and such. Needless to say, the security of such a service is paramount and there's no way that I'd ever entrust my banking credentials to any service hosted in the cloud. You just can't get the same level of security you can get when you've got physical control over your hosting.