The Cloud Isn't Your Data Center (And That's Okay)
- By Lachlan Colquhoun
- May 23, 2024
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The choice between the public cloud and an on-premises data center is, according to Chris Jones, like balancing the advantages of owning or renting a car.
“When you're in your home setting, you don't rent a car every single day because if you did that, you'd go broke,” said Jones, an advisory systems engineer at Nutanix.
“At home, you buy a car, or you lease it long term. It's a better financial outcome, but when you go on your European holiday, you don't take your car with you. You hire one. You pay a premium, get your outcome, and give it back when you are finished."
Jones used the analogy in a presentation at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations and Cloud Strategies conference, which was held in Sydney in May 2024.
Speaking on “How Cloud Smart Companies Spend Less on IT and Accelerate Digital Business,” Jones described how many organizations found that their cloud migration strategies "are costing us too much or are a lot more complicated than we first thought it would be."
Organizations also found that moving to the cloud meant sacrificing "a level of flexibility that we were used to in an on-prem environment."
“The public cloud was really designed to be that utility for spontaneous consumption,” said Jones.
“It wasn’t designed to be a replacement to the data center, but it’s great for that elastic workload when you burst up or burst down.”
Stuck in the cloud
At the same time, Jones said organizations were finding that the wholesale movement of workloads to the cloud was “becoming much more expensive.”
“There’s one energy retailer that we’ve been talking to recently who migrated everything to a public cloud provider and got some early wins in those migrations, and they now run the entire enterprise out of this particular cloud provider," he said.
“But they’ve also seen on average for the past 15 years about a 15% increase in the costs of running that, so it’s prompting them to ask, ‘how do I get out of it?’”
This organization now found itself stuck because even though it might want to reconfigure its infrastructure mix, doing so would likely cost more than the 15% cost increase they have already had to bear.
Nuanced choice
Jones's point was that the choice between the cloud and on-prem was more nuanced and demanded an approach that classified workloads and applications with infrastructure decisions flowing accordingly.
"There are potentially multiple providers around applications, storage providers, and network providers," he said.
“You might have edge sites, a different architecture for edge versus data centers, a completely different substrata for what is happening in the public cloud."
"People are not using data centers in full, and they're not using the public cloud in full."
The cloud journey was not "a destination and an endpoint to achieve" but a way of creating business value outcomes. Today, this involves optimizing the use of data, where edge solutions have a significant role.
"So how do I go and manage all these different types of data generated in different locations and the different gravity of the data," Jones said.
“I might be deploying into the cloud across multiple clouds, and then I might use outposts in an edge location.”
Jones said that just because organizations might use multiple clouds didn't mean they were multicloud.
In many cases, they were operating within each of these silos, which required a data fabric approach to deliver a level of integration and consistency.
"So people are not using data centers in full, and they're not using the public cloud in full; they are trying to find a solution that sits in the middle and tries to achieve outcomes around cost governance, security compliance, the movement and protection of data and freedom of choice when it comes to running applications," said Jones.
He gave the example of a retail organization that needed more capacity during Christmas sales or Black Friday.
“Traditionally, you've got two choices. One, I could build everything in a data center, but I would need to make sure that my infrastructure has the capacity to hit 100% for effectively what might only be one day per year," said Jones.
“Or I could size my data center to just be 80% or 90% of my capacity, and then you use the public cloud for that burst when you need a little bit of space, temporarily extend that fabric up into the cloud.”
“Once you're done, turn it off, bring it back into an on-prem data center environment, so you need that scalability and elasticity.”
Image credit: iStockphoto/ra2studio
Lachlan Colquhoun
Lachlan Colquhoun is the Australia and New Zealand correspondent for CDOTrends and the NextGenConnectivity editor. He remains fascinated with how businesses reinvent themselves through digital technology to solve existing issues and change their business models.