Steve Bigelow: The days of vast, complex, and
costly private data centers are waning as
businesses look for workload deployment
alternatives. Perhaps the most important of these
alternatives is the public cloud. There are five
major factors that drive businesses to migrate
their workloads to the public cloud. So, let's
look at each one. Cost benefits are usually the
first factor that drives workload migration to the
public cloud. Traditional data centers require
expensive investments in physical hardware and
facilities, not to mention the costs of continued
maintenance. In some cases, being tied to hardware
can stifle innovation too. In the public cloud, a
business uses the cloud provider's infrastructure
and services, which sheds much of the investment
and overhead associated with running business
applications. But remember, I said cost benefits
and not cost savings. There are certainly still
costs involved when operating a workload in the
public cloud. And over time, those total costs are
not always lower than they would be if the
workload was run locally. The difference is in how
those costs are handled.
Cloud providers typically bill on a pay-as-you-go
basis, and businesses only pay for the resources
they actually use. Organizations can transition
potentially risky capital expenses to recurring
operating expenses, and exercise granular control
over those costs. And this can vastly lower their
financial risk for a business and possibly enhance
its willingness to innovate. A traditional data
center can impose serious maintenance headaches.
The business owns and operates the facility and
infrastructure which it needs to keep running
24/7. This means dealing with a mind-boggling
array of logistical issues that include monitoring
power, cooling, server status, storage, network
performance, application health, and more.
When a server fails or an air conditioning unit
needs repairs, the business has to foot the bill.
With the public cloud, many of those worries go
away; the cloud provider is responsible for
keeping the lights on and the systems running.
High availability is a vital strategy for
mission-critical workloads. But it can be
difficult to execute. Organizations have to guard
the workload against data center failures, either
due to connectivity problems or physical issues
such as natural disasters. But data centers are
prohibitively expensive, and most organizations
just can't afford redundant locations in different
parts of the world. Public clouds are global by
nature, with many data centers spread
strategically worldwide. Enterprises can run
workloads redundantly across multiple cloud
regions to provide comprehensive workload
availability in a way that would just be far too
expensive or technically demanding locally.
Today's businesses seek a global reach, which
means accommodating a global user base. Network
latency and unpredictable effects of internet
congestion can impair workload performance for
users on distant continents. And this can lead to
user dissatisfaction and a loss of competitive
advantage for the business. The global footprint
that powers public cloud providers can also boost
workload performance in key global markets. An
organization can run a workload in a cloud
provider region, such as Asia Pacific, for
example, that brings that workload closer to its
intended audience, keeping latency and congestion
low and effectively boosting performance and the
resulting user experience. Finally, public clouds
are developing an astonishing array of specialized
services. These tools readily support a greater
range of workload types that an organization can't
readily cobble together inside their own data
centers.
For example, big data projects can take thousands
of server instances, enormous amounts of memory,
and complex supporting software. Doing all this
locally is expensive. But the vast availability of
public cloud resources and ready-made services
make complex tasks faster and more practical
without any infrastructure investment. The point
here is that tomorrow's businesses can focus on
designing and running workloads that benefit their
businesses, rather than worrying about deploying
and maintaining their own infrastructure.
Now, none of this means that the local data center
is going away. Mission critical and security
sensitive workloads may still need the oversight
and control that a local facility can provide. But
the cloud has become an attractive alternative for
all the reasons we've discussed here and more.
I'm Steve Bigelow, Senior Technology Editor for
TechTarget.
For more information on all aspects of cloud
computing, visit searchcloudcomputing.com. Thanks
for joining me.