Cloud computing is becoming the deployment model of choice for many workloads, causing public cloud spend to grow at a double-digit rate, with no sign of slowing down.
However, most companies realise they can’t transition all workloads at once — even if they wanted to – leaving IDC to predict that 58.7 percent of infrastructure spend this year will stay in the data centre.
With business leaders pushing hard for cloud migration, how should IT leaders respond?
Plan for tomorrow
There are a myriad of reasons for keeping applications in-house. These include regulatory compliance issues, security, data sovereignty requirements, the need for low latency, and use of custom legacy applications that won’t run on public cloud platforms.
What is needed is a cloud-ready architecture — including hardware, operating systems, databases, and applications — that is consistent across on-premises and cloud environments. This will make it easier to transition when the time is right.
Mapping your cloud-ready journey:While the route will vary, depending on where an individual IT organization is starting, there are five typical use cases that describe the different requirements of each leg — and thus, the best path forward.
1. Streamline and modernize IT infrastructure
For businesses without immediate plans to move to the cloud but that wants to streamline its infrastructure, pre-built, converged infrastructure.
These modern systems that are architecturally compatible with those powering private cloud and public cloud services can deliver dramatic improvements in performance, availability, security, and efficiency while lowering operating costs, by replacing older, multi-vendor servers, storage, and backup.
2. Accelerate time to value with appliances
Many IT organisations have to do more with less, and faster, to respond to competitive threats. In such a situation, an appliance strategy can provide great benefit. Purpose built ‘appliances’ that are preconfigured to serve different purposes, such as to support a database, a private cloud environment, or big-data workloads. They are easy to deploy and operate, requiring less time and fewer specialised IT skills.
3. Optimise and extend private cloud
For generic, noncritical workloads, many organizations first implement private cloud environments with the aim of lowering costs and achieving greater agility.
But most self-assembled, generic, private clouds take months to build out— decreasing agility — and require expensive personnel to build, tune, and manage.
They also typically use Linux distributions and virtualisation software that require expensive licenses and support contracts to run. Another challenge is because generic private clouds treat all applications equally, they are inappropriate for demanding and/or business-critical databases and applications.
The solution is to adopt purpose-built, cloud appliances that are consistent across environments, enabling organisations to implement a private cloud that is cost-optimised for generic applications and performance-optimised for more-critical applications. This provides an easy path to public or hybrid cloud, with unified management across environments.
4. Optimise and secure critical applications
For business-critical applications, in many cases, the infrastructure supporting them has been built over time, lags in modernisation, and is an inconsistent mix of platforms.
The result is an overly complex environment that doesn’t always deliver the required performance or security. The solution is to employ high-end servers to optimize end ensure peak performance while improving efficiency with the highest security, whether implemented on-premises or in the cloud. Moving to a single platform will also bring cost savings and unified management.
5. Consolidate and protect data with advanced storage solutions
Finally, most every company is facing data storage and protection challenges. With the explosion of data volumes, simply adding to an existing storage infrastructure is no longer affordable or effective.
The better approach is to implement modern storage solutions engineered to eliminate data loss and cut recovery times. These cloud-ready systems enable you to consolidate existing storage while ensuring the security of your data and dramatically improving performance.
Future
For each of these use cases, the aim is to match cloud-ready systems that have precise equivalents in the public cloud. In this way, the public cloud appears as a compatible extension of what already runs in your data center, making it easier to move when you’re ready.
Even if you have no immediate plans to move to the cloud, it’s a nice option to have. In the meantime, you’re able to bring many benefits of the public cloud into your on-premises infrastructure. Wouldn’t you like to be prepared for a cloud future?
- The writer is Senior Vice President, Systems, JAPAC