The promise of outsourcing has always been that a company could leverage experts and assets outside its own walls to provide specialized and continuously updated capabilities at a lower price than it could provide itself. The benefits from that leverage, however, often proved elusive. Then cloud computing came along to offer even more computing capacity, greater scalability and potentially greater savings. But take note: while the benefits of moving work to the cloud can be big, they are not automatic. It’s worth keeping these few recommendations in mind.