A two-year project to develop the next-generation architecture for the Portico archive of e-journals, e-books, and other electronic scholarly content was the occasion for Portico staff to step back and consider, not just what that architecture should be, but also where it should be. Should we continue to host all of our ingest, archiving, management, and access systems in our current data centers, or should we leverage the elasticity of established cloud infrastructures, with easy hardware scalability (both vertical and horizontal) as well as well-developed DevOps and other software tools? Come walk through the process Portico undertook to develop the criteria for making this choice, the decisions we reached, and why. Sheila M. Morrissey Senior Researcher ITHAKA 100 Campus Drive Suite 100 Princeton NJ 08540 609-986-2221 sheila.morrissey@ithaka.org<mailto:sheila.morrissey@ithaka.org> ITHAKA (www.ithaka.org<http://www.ithaka.org/>) is a not-for-profit organization that helps the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways. We provide innovative services that benefit higher education, including Ithaka S+R, JSTOR, and Portico.