In my last post, I examined the demands IT transformation places on organizations that want to provide IT as a service (ITaaS). I suggested that while those demands make public cloud solutions very tempting, a hybrid approach combining private cloud deployments with public cloud services seems to fit the goals and IT readiness of most organizations. At least in the near- to mid-term, many of the executives that I’ve talked with plan to operate a hybrid cloud environment, with regulatory and security requirements and the needs of the business determining the balance between private and public.
What’s really interesting is the range many executives estimate when asked what that balance will be over the next two to five years. While one CIO estimated that 60 percent of his workload would likely stay on premise in a private cloud, another suggested 50 to 60 percent of his organization’s workload would be in the public cloud. Yet another commented, “We see in three years being able to
For companies in highly regulated industries, regulatory and security concerns prevent them from taking advantage of public cloud technologies. Surprisingly, executives in these industries believe that in two to three years that barrier to entry will not exist and the technology will have matured to a point that satisfies regulators. As one healthcare executive observed, “I can't go to the public cloud today because of HIPAA, but I will be there. I believe we're close.”
From many of my discussions about public versus private cloud, it emerged that the use cases and workloads that companies are considering for the public cloud today are not necessarily data sensitive. They’re test/dev, scratch space, burst—efforts where they're not as concerned from a security perspective. But there are a few outliers who are running revenue-generating applications in the public cloud right now.
What continues to underpin decisions on “which” cloud is the workload. More and more emphasis will be placed on understanding the workload so that better decisions can be made. This is just common sense, but it’s not always applied. Primarily because it’s so easy to move quickly to the public cloud. Yet many customers find that at a certain scale and for certain workloads the cost- benefit equation no longer makes sense. This scenario will certainly play it itself out more and more as companies expand their off-premise capacity.
A U.S.-based financial organization summed up a hybrid model that could meet the needs of many organizations, “For new capabilities that don’t exist within the infrastructure today, we’re going to jump directly to cloud. It will be more of journey where we have restrictive regulatory requirements and a significant legacy investment. Ultimately, only the more unique requirements will continue in our data centers versus sourcing from others who can create larger scale.”
Suffice to say that the principles of cloud technology, which are essentially the same whether public or private, are driving the move to ITaaS. The mix of private and public cloud solutions will vary by organization, but it’s clear that public cloud will be a part of any future ITaaS strategy. In my next post, I’ll take a look at how companies decide whether to move a workload to the private or public cloud—and how that decision will drive application transformation.
