Why are all the cool kids using the public cloud?
Public cloud infrastructure allows businesses to cut costs (eventually) and gain flexibility. It is ideal for growing businesses looking to scale quickly or companies that want to save on maintenance and administration costs. Using public cloud infrastructure is a no-brainer. With the public cloud, you don’t need to spend money upfront or invest any time managing physical servers and other IT infrastructure like switches, tape libraries, etc. You pay for the resources that you need as they are required. Instead of managing your hardware and in some cases software/applications, you can focus on growing your business. Because experts manage your infrastructure, there’s no need to worry about hardware breaking down or needing urgent repairs. This allows your existing IT staff to work on higher-level tasks and deliver better quality and higher value to the company.
Cost Savings
Most public cloud providers are offering deep discounts to enterprise users and even free services to all customers. “There are a lot of companies out there that are using public clouds,” says Scott Brinkman, CEO of CloudSuite. “For those companies, I think there’s a lot of value in getting lower prices.” In reality, most enterprises take two years to see those discounts on their bottom line. This usually comes down to the fact that they need to continue supporting their existing environments and infrastructure while they modernized, automate, and migrate to the cloud. One big piece of advice that I have when trying to move to the cloud is to truly look at the total cost of ownership calculators and also ask the question “What am I doing now, that I don’t have to do in the cloud?” When your IT staff no longer has to spend time replacing failed hard drives or upgrading hardware because you’ve outgrown your current system… What can they be doing now? Put those same employees to work making your processes more efficient. Remember, you only pay for what you use in the cloud so getting efficient is the name of the game.
Scalability
Regarding scalability, public cloud infrastructure has always been touted as one of its core strengths. However, some recent research suggests that this is no longer the case. According to Gartner, many organizations find that public cloud services are not as scalable as they once thought. Ordering some of the largest SKUs can sometimes take months to get put in place. Electronic shortages have hit us all over the last few years. It is especially true regarding large-scale migrations or updates to large data sets because public cloud providers sometimes can’t provide the scalability or performance needed to support these activities. To deal with these issues, IT teams need to consider multi-region, private cloud and/or multi-cloud solutions to provide them with the level of control and flexibility they need to make the necessary changes. Another option is to buy capacity reservations to ensure capacity, but that is going to affect the lower costs we expect from cloud providers. Even so, this is only going to affect the biggest of customers or customers that need more specialized solutions for their needs.
Mobility
Public cloud infrastructure is fast becoming the preferred choice for enterprise IT as companies recognize the advantages of public cloud infrastructure. Such as the ability to leverage scale and pay only for the resources they need without over-invest in expensive private cloud solutions. Couple that with the ability to deploy worldwide, and you can always be where your customers are. Not to mention the ability to deploy worldwide solutions at a moment’s notice if you truly need that global reach. If a business wants to move operations from one country to another, it is as simple as selecting a new region to deploy your services. Imagine physically moving a data center to another country!
Resource Sharing
Most businesses would not consider using a shared infrastructure a decade ago for something as valuable as company data. This goes to show you how far we have come when it comes to virtualized workloads and the trust we have in securing those virtual workloads. Instead, these days we’re talking about big public clouds, like Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine, and Azure, which most people think about when they think about public clouds. In that context, the resource-sharing model of public clouds makes sense. The key here is not that they’re public but that there’s no need for a long contract, a lot of maintenance, and lots of administration. By allowing these big cloud companies to benefit from economies of scale, we can focus on putting our staff on more valuable projects.
Conclusion
One of the main benefits of cloud infrastructure is cost savings. Even if it doesn’t show immediately on the financial statements, the piece of mind of having your data behind a 99.95% uptime SLA with 99.9999999% data durability creates stability and trust with clients and staff. It is because it allows for better utilization of IT resources which means lower capital expenditure and more predictable expenses. The public cloud market is growing very fast, with the number of service providers increasing in recent years. A variety of cloud services are offered in the public cloud with a wide choice of vendors and price models. A public cloud provides all of the benefits of a private cloud with the added advantage of being accessible and managed by a single provider. It enables the end user to take advantage of cloud computing without needing to build their physical data center. Don’t wait for your competitors to make the journey to the cloud before you do. If you are old enough to remember Blockbuster, don’t make the same mistake they made. Innovate!!!
On a more personal note: The last few years have been some of the most challenging, but rewarding times in my career. The journey to the cloud is something that you don’t truly get until you’ve started down that path. I’ve seen more creative ideas and people pushing themselves out of their comfort zone than I have in the previous 15 years I’ve been in IT. I can’t wait to see how things progress over the next few years. Take care!