Counterpoint - Choose the Right Cloud for the Right Workload

Earlier this year, Gartner predicted that cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) would grow 35.9 percent to reach $40.8 billion in revenue in 2018. Public cloud IaaS is clearly the main driver of that growth, and Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform are dominating the cloud conversation. With 40,000 people expected to descend upon Las Vegas for AWS re:Invent, public cloud will be on the minds of most of the IT community this week.

Is public cloud the right move for your organization? In the long term, the answer is probably, “yes.” However, in the short term, there are a number of challenges that organizations, especially those with massive legacy environments, have to navigate, and rushing to move to a public cloud can be risky and expensive. Consider these potential barriers to cloud adoption:

• Lack of cloud talent: 80% of organizations who are new to cloud struggle with a lack of resources and expertise, according to RightScale’s 2018 State of the Cloud report. Hiring cloud talent is becoming more and more challenging. 
• Cost: While reducing costs, and moving from CapEx to OpEx, have been major talking points for cloud IaaS vendors for years, the reality is that moving to the cloud will likely be more expensive than you anticipate, especially if you lack in-house cloud talent. Managing cloud costs on the other side of the transition is a significant obstacle.
• Compatibility: Many legacy workloads sitting on-premise in a virtualized environment today will have to be rewritten/refactored to work optimally in a public cloud environment or replaced with SaaS. Both of these options are often expensive and complex.

The challenges above can be debilitating; they can delay or even completely derail a move to the cloud, particularly for organizations who are more risk averse. What can those organizations do to start to take advantage of the benefits of cloud while reducing the risk and cost associated with a move to public cloud IaaS?

The answer is to consider a multi-cloud strategy, which will likely be the reality for most organizations anyway. IT leaders should evaluate each workload’s fit within a cloud solution and choose the best cloud for each workload. This will inevitably result in two separate cloud strategies:

• Where do I build or place new applications? Generally, these will find a home in your public cloud of choice.
• What do I do with my legacy workloads? These workloads run best in a “like-for-like” cloud environment, where they will run like they do on-premises. For workloads that are virtualized on-premises using VMware® today, OVHcloud™ offers a VMware-based Hosted Private Cloud that is the most “like-for-like” cloud solution on the market.

Migrating legacy workloads to a Hosted Private Cloud is a quick win for organizations considering a move to the cloud. OVHcloud has extensive migration experience, in-house VMware expertise, and a cloud environment that most closely mirrors your on-premises VMware environment. You likely have the VMware skills in-house to manage the solution post-migration.

Public cloud will likely continue to dominate the conversation, but it doesn’t have to be the only way. Often, it isn’t the best way. Tomorrow, we’ll share some details about the migration process that will hopefully illustrate just how effortless the transition to our Hosted Private Cloud can be, and we’ll follow that up with a customer story.

Want to talk about your environment? You can check out our Hosted Private Cloud offering, chat with us, or request a call back here.