Inside the McDonald's IT department, there are times when a great deal of application development takes place and times that are relatively slow. Because of the peaks and valleys of the development team's work cycle, it made sense to move the process to a cloud-computing environment, reports eWeek's Darryl Taft.

"The challenge for me is when I'm trying to provide an environment for my application teams to deliver a product and they need XYZ tooling, I have to buy enough tooling to cover everyone in that peak moment, which ends up being really costly," said Scott Farnum, global infrastructure lab manager for the fast food chain. "Then, outside that peak moment, we are not using those tools, and in some cases we will slow down development accordingly. So we needed a model that was going to be flexible to any business condition and any development condition."

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Farnum recommends that an IT department be in the habit of using Internet-based systems and maintain a flexible mindset before migrating to a cloud-computing platform.