Your company wants the most efficient IT environment possible to help achieve your business goals
Over the course of a few articles, I’ve been telling you about common public cloud concerns and why hybrid IT gives you the right mix of public cloud, private cloud and on-premises solutions.
Determining an effective hybrid IT strategy can take time, but when you find it, it can also reap big rewards. Of course, I don’t expect you to take my word for it. But maybe you will take advice from those who tried public cloud and have since moved to a hybrid IT strategy.
I’ve compiled a few quotes from a variety of organizations of all sizes and industries. Each has experienced public cloud and now has moved to hybrid IT. So here you go — advice from businesses that have been in your shoes:
Public cloud performance issues
“We’re moving some of our web infrastructure workloads back to our own data center. Performance was the big issue. Lack of communication from our public cloud provider led to a customer-facing outage we could not have prevented. Now we’re seriously rethinking our entire cloud strategy and are moving more workloads back on-prem.” — Social Media company
“We’re bringing back apps that we had put on the public cloud and didn’t go as planned because of reduced performance. That said, there are other apps we feel are truly more cloud-ready, and we’re trying those out in the cloud so we can have what we deem to be a truly hybrid solution.” — Financial Services company
Public cloud cost concerns
“We opted to be bleeding-edge and move to cloud when storage and hypervisor license costs were on the climb. It seemed to be a better way to keep costs in an OpEx mode and know what they were. As we grew, the usage did too … and the bills grew far faster. We honestly reached a tipping point when billing started to approach $100,000 per month. We had good financial outcomes moving on-prem with a hybrid solution so we can access cloud when we choose. We now have two times the horsepower on-prem for half the cost.” — Social Media company
“One of the biggest issues driving declouding for us is that, to be honest, the initial move to the public cloud was done willy-nilly. We moved the workloads and then we moved the apps to run off those workloads. But we didn’t really think about how to stage properly, how to control usage costs and how to design an exit strategy. We quickly learned that cloud costs were far higher than we expected.” — Retail company
Public cloud control concerns
“Flexibility is important. With a private cloud, we get the control and flexibility of a dedicated environment that’s tailor-made to address our specific IT needs. For fast-growing companies like ours with constantly changing requirements, a private cloud offers more flexibility to adapt and evolve as the company changes.” — Social Media company
“The data we hosted on AWS was growing exponentially, as all data does, and that increased costs. Public cloud hosting served its purpose when we entered the all-cloud (for the most part) approach, but then you hit this point where it doesn’t make financial or operational sense any longer, when the same thing can be accomplished on-prem for less money and less hassle. Having the workloads back on-site gave us better control over usage, and we could better see spikes in activity.” — Public Sector company
The benefits of hybrid IT
Many businesses have already started to move beyond the public cloud into a new era of hybrid IT that combines public cloud, private cloud and traditional IT. New offerings such as hyperconverged and composable infrastructures offer cloud-like capabilities on-premises — solutions that can provide businesses more control, greater performance, less cost, and less risk than many public cloud options. A combination of on-premises, software-defined options within a private cloud seamlessly combined with public cloud lets businesses build the best possible infrastructure for their individual workloads.
“The lower cost of storage, servers and even better servers that require less hypervisor licenses made it less costly than it once was to scale out a data center or private cloud on-site.” — Energy company
Organizations all over the world are taking a closer look at their applications and deciding which ones should be in the public cloud and which ones should remain on traditional IT or a private cloud. Remember, although performance, cost and control issues are all relevant, you should always consider the business model of each workload in your decision.
About Gary Thome
Gary Thome is the Vice President and Chief Technologist for the Software-Defined and Cloud Group at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. He is responsible for the technical and architectural directions of converged datacenter products and technologies including HPE Synergy. To learn how composable infrastructure can help you achieve a hybrid IT environment in your data center, download the free HPE Synergy for Dummies eBook.To read more articles from Gary, check out the HPE Converged Data Center Infrastructure blog
