Cloud is "CLOUD", but is it One Size?

The impact of “cloud” is substantial, there are great examples of how centralised cloud services are transforming the provision and delivery of IT services. The characteristics of cloud deliver significant benefits to businesses today and they can be simplified using the following mnemonic – CLOUD.

Cloud is:

Co-located: Multi-tenant or shared service options can provide significant business convergence and cost benefits.

Location and supplier independence: avoid supplier lock-in by enabling portability of services between suppliers, anywhere in the UK. Ideally, this should be an easy process to on-board and leave.

On-Demand: one of the key benefits of cloud-based services is that they can scale with your needs. Turn them on, when you need them, and turn them off when you do not – simple.

Utility: your cloud services will be delivered and consumed “as-a-service”, with pay-per-user, pay-per-month and pay-as-you-go – through to monthly and annual subscriptions terms of engagement. There are many different consumption models.

Digital Platform: The inter-dependencies between Social Media, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC), also known as the Third Platform, is transforming the way people and businesses relate to technology and this serves as an enabler for digital business transformation.

Cloud is a method, not a location

There is a common perception that “the cloud” refers to public cloud providers like Azure, AWS and Google, but in reality, cloud is not a location.

 Cloud is a process that allows businesses to become more agile and deliver IT services dynamically, notably in a self-service fashion. Cloud permeates everything we do across application hosting, service management, collaboration, network functions, Internet of Things and many other domains. The provider of those services can be a public cloud provider, a sovereign community cloud provider (specialist), the organisation’s own internal IT staff (private cloud) or a combination of multiple delivery models (hybrid).

Cloud is NOT One-Size

Cloud is not a ONE-SIZE fits all approach to existing IT challenges and key lessons have shown that organisations need a combination of delivery models (public, private), cloud services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) and platforms, so flexible multicloud architectures are being adopted with cloud brokerage capabilities to retain governance, visibility and control.

The price war amongst the public cloud providers is causing the cloud market to become increasingly commoditised, which one could argue is good for the consumer as it reduces prices. However, organisations need to manage the following considerations carefully and question the business case when compared with vertical or niche specialist providers like Cloud and Managed Services Program (CMSP) Partners offering additional value. 

Cloud is NOT:

“One throat to choke”. You get what you pay for with self-service, so additional cost is needed for top-up services like availability, 24x7 support and a variety of professional services. What about SLA’s, service credits, change control and helpdesk in the event of service outages?

Necessarily cheaper than on-premise or private cloud deployment models. Unmanaged cloud causes unplanned spend, and stops organisations from realising the benefits. There are hidden costs in the migration to cloud including on-boarding consultancy services, people, process and skills impacts, network connectivity (significant), governance and controls around cloud consumption, contract management and security policy review plus many more. All of these costs need to be factored into the TCO.

Engineered for ALL application workloads as they are distributed – some being traditional and on-premise for security or performance needs, some residing in hosted private clouds and some migrating to public clouds. The public cloud tends to claim many cloud-native applications workloads (IoT, email, enterprise social networks) and real-time data-oriented workloads. The private cloud, at scale, tends to attract ERP and supply chain logistics, while conventional data centres still tend to host HR and traditional data-oriented workloads like content management. 

Solution to vendor lock-in as some providers use proprietary technologies and offer application developers services that are unique to their own platforms.   

Infinite in scale and performance, so customers recognise that a hybrid cloud approach is necessary to avail the benefits of both public and private/on premise deployment characteristics.

Zone-based availability of applications in isolation. If the applications are not cloud native, how is service availability maintained end-to-end and business contingency achieved? Careful consideration of data protection and data sovereignty needs are critical.

Easy to govern and presents new risks to the business that need to be assessed and managed. Careful application dependency mapping and visibility of infrastructure traffic flows is essential for migration planning and architecture is needed for new cloud native application deployments.

A multi-cloud strategy is transformative for businesses

A multi-cloud approach is gaining momentum and there is recognition that a one size cloud model does not offer extended capabilities to meet the diverse needs of the business.

Multi-cloud allows organisations to customise their deployments and maximise the value they see from their cloud investments. This approach will minimise the risk of widespread data loss or downtime due to a localised cloud service outage and it can avoid “proprietary vendor lock-in” by using different infrastructures and developers are not tied to specific cloud platforms. These issues coupled with concerns over data sovereignty, data protection laws (GDPR enforced May 2018) and the need to manage mixed hybrid IT environments is driving the multi-cloud adoption.

Multi-cloud is not without its own challenges around quality of service, visibility and management of multiple platforms. However, organisations can deploy Cloud Management Platforms like Cisco CloudCenter, to ensure the right policies, automation and governance is in place to optimise performance and lower costs.

Cloud and Managed Services Program (CMSP) Partners offer a range of cloud services and deployment models with different levels of assurance to meet the security and business requirements of consumers. Each deployment model is associated with particular security controls, infrastructure capabilities and SLA’s that dictate which applications and services may run over them.