Creating a Public Cloud Experience In-House

David Linthicum is the Senior Vice President of Cloud Technology Partners.

The cloud has revolutionized the way we build IT systems within enterprises. Indeed, enterprise IT’s goal since the inception of cloud computing has been to replicate the power of cloud computing within their own data centers.

The trouble is that cloud computing systems were built net-new, which meant they could start from scratch and thus be more innovative with the use of cloud-based resources using the most modern technology and approaches available. Enterprises don’t have the same luxury. Decades of enterprise hardware and software purchases exist at different levels of maturation, and those structures must also support mission-critical systems in operations.

However, things are changing. New technology now provides enterprises with the public cloud experience, which includes:

In this article, I’ll take you through the steps to leverage the value of public clouds on-premises. I’ll include a path to leverage cloud concepts in ways that you may not have known about, where available new technologies support the concept of software-defined data centers (SDDC).

The Public Cloud Experience

The data is overwhelming around the adoption of public clouds. By 2018, IDC forecasts that public cloud spending will more than double to $127.5 billion. This forecast is broken down as follows: $82.7 billion in SaaS spending, $24.6 billion for IaaS and $20.3 billion in PaaS expenditures. What caused the shift to public clouds? There are five primary strategic drivers:

Tactical advantages are easier to define:

One of the primary drivers of cloud computing is the value of business agility. Business agility is the ability to make quick changes in a business to meet changing business needs. Examples would include the ability to add a new product line, expand into new markets, or provide customer visibility into product shipments.

Public cloud computing provides business agility. The ability to provision and scale a system is built into the architecture of most public clouds. If there is a business need for a new system, it’s just a matter of provisioning the resources required from public cloud providers. This process is much quicker and easier than purchasing, configuring, and hosting your own hardware and software assets.

The value of business agility really depends upon the type of business. Those in the healthcare and finance verticals obtain a great deal of value from agile platforms, such as cloud-based platforms. Verticals with relatively static business processes, such as many manufacturing organizations, may not realize as much value around the use of cloud computing.

Moving forward, public clouds are becoming much more feature rich, with additional capabilities that meet or exceed what enterprises currently run in-house. This lead to public clouds being the desired platform of choice, although enterprises may be limited as to aspects of the public clouds that they can actually use.

Building an On-premises Private Cloud

So, what are the required capabilities of on-premises private clouds that will meet your needs? A few features to consider would be:

What’s key about the items above is that they are all features that can be found in an SDDC as well as a private cloud. In essence, you can find an analog for public cloud technology within your own data centers, including the ability to provide elasticity, centralization, and operational efficiency.

Moreover, these systems can provide the ability to auto- and self-provision compute and storage resources, allowing you to provision resources at the application level. The alternative is to try to predict capacities, and attempt to align need with hardware resources. It’s a guessing game that costs big money, since there is no way to tightly align the needs of production with hardware resources. However, using a private cloud within an SDDC, you’re able to provide a platform that’s able to better respond to the application and user needs.

Finally, there is the ability to support widely distributed architectures that provide self-healing capabilities, such as working around a server or storage system that’s failing. Or, working around breaks in network services, as well as dealing with active/active data redundancy in support of business continuity.

The first step is to understand your own requirements, and that means doing the up-front work. While your own requirements will differ a bit, the following, at the very least, should be understood.

Architectures and Solutions to Consider

Once we have the requirements down, we can consider a number of meta-architectures as options including: Private, public, and hybrid/multi. Public has already been explored above. Private clouds provide you with more control and sometimes better efficiency as well, if the right technology is selected and leveraged in the right ways. In other words, you can replicate the public cloud user experience by using private cloud solutions.

However, sometimes it makes sense to pair private clouds with public clouds, thus creating a hybrid or multi-cloud solution. These are more complex than just private or just public clouds, but do allow you to place different workloads on different clouds, depending upon what those workloads need to do. For instance, placing a big data system on a public cloud for cost efficiency due to storage needs, and having that big data system work in conjunction with systems that exist on private clouds.

Of course, there are many public cloud success stories, including Netflix. They focused on delivery of a video streaming service that was more cost effective to run on a public cloud. Indeed, they are going so for the same reason that Groupon is running in their own data center. Netflix ran the numbers, and, for them, the public cloud was the most effective and efficient solution.

What are the Must Haves When Looking for a Private Cloud?

So, what are the must haves when looking for private clouds solutions? There are a few key concepts to consider.

First, ease of use. The private cloud technology must serve those in operations, as well as application developers, and even application users. There are many dimensions to consider, including the ways that each person views the private cloud through their own set of interfaces.

Second, cost efficiencies. How well does the private cloud do at minimizing costs? It’s important that we run the numbers and understand the cost expectations, in terms of what we’ll spend for the private cloud by resource, application, and user, as well as what efficiencies the private cloud will bring.

When doing these calculations, make sure to figure in the value of agility, or the value of providing the ability to quickly change and expand business processes. While this value is difficult to determine, you should look at the strategic value of agility to the business. For example, what is the value of bringing a product to market in days, rather than months or sometimes years? It typically means millions to the bottom line.

Call to Action

So, what does all of this mean for your enterprise? The core message: The value of public cloud does not necessarily need to be delivered by a public cloud. Using SDDC and converged systems, as well as best-of-breed private cloud platforms, enterprises can provide a cost-effective hybrid cloud alternative to public clouds for enterprises.

As cloud computing continues its growth in popularity, and public clouds become more powerful, the use of the public cloud resources will be contraindicated by many enterprises. For those companies that exist in this category, it’s good to know that they have powerful and effective options that will open the door to the public cloud experience.

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