New technological concepts often hit us like tidal waves, with overwhelming amounts of education, information and opinions to absorb. Like mobile computing, the Internet of Things and 3D printing, “the cloud” seems to be no exception.
We struggle to digest all of the information that comes flying at us, and in the process we make the information easier to assimilate by making assumptions. Lots of assumptions. Oftentimes very erroneous assumptions. It’s important to cut through some pre-held beliefs to minimize the risk around your own cloud journey. Some of these include:
Assumption 1: Public cloud is much more cost effective than private cloud.
Hmmm – well it can be. But quite often adding the need for compliance, management efforts and upgrades to aid performance can make actually make a public cloud more costly. The costs of public clouds don’t take into consideration the customization of your application – so when a change is made, the impact to your application can be unknown. Public clouds are not for everyone and making them fit highly customized, integrated or specialized requirements can escalate the costs and time to market quickly.
Assumption 2: The cloud is less expensive than traditional on-premise computing.
Every organization has a different combination of factors that impact their evaluation between an on-premise deployment, a cloud provider or a combination. The tradeoff becomes a decision of what you choose to be part of your organization’s competencies compared to a managed cloud service – which may appear more expansive on the surface. However, the full ‘cost’ is about determining what you will pay for within your walls versus outside of them, including professional management and tuning of the environment, security testing and validation, back-ups and redundancy, and 24x7 hour support – a level of infrastructure management that many organizations are not able to do themselves.
Assumption 3: The only way to be in the cloud is to have applications built natively for the cloud.
While there are plenty of great applications built for the cloud, organizations can still realize all of the benefits of the cloud with their current applications. It really comes down to what you are looking for with a move to the cloud. There are many models that can fit your unique needs, and it is critical to choose the right cloud platform for the application as well as a provider that can support your organization through the migration to the cloud. The length of the journey and its pace is up to you.
The bottom line is that organizations need to be careful about making assumptions and generalizations when it comes to choosing a cloud environment. What are seemingly small differences in a provider’s offerings can equal big differences once you look under the hood. It is important to really dig into how the cloud offering relates to your application, industry and data security requirements, and contrast that with your technical, strategic and financial needs in order to find the right cloud model. For both partners who service their customers – and customers themselves – that means engaging the right cloud experts to deliver a best-in-class cloud journey.
For more information on how to choose the right cloud deployment model, view this infographic “Which Cloud Type is Right for You?”
Written by Steve Terp, Concerto Cloud Services.
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