Cloud Should Not Be A Compromise

With the exposure to partners and customers at varying stages in the Cloud journey, I often have to do a lot of objection handling. Over and above the usual perceived inhibitors of Bandwidth and Security, I have discussions around Control. Bandwidth costs are dropping at a rapid rate and it feels like there is more fibre in the ground than there is copper. Users are also starting to trust that a Cloud environment is likely more secure than the server sitting in a broom cupboard in their office or the Server room that has the key stuck to the wall next to it with prestik.

The real problem that Cloud providers face is that a Managed Service Provider or end customer thinks that a move to the Cloud gives them LESS flexibility in what they are able to do with Cloud resources and the environment that Cloud servers reside in. This is often very true, where control is sometimes limited to starting and stopping a server, heaven forbid opening a port on a firewall or creating a VLAN.

The concept of scalability, and agility are quickly dispelled when a call needs to be logged for a simple thing like creating a new VLAN. When you have workloads on premise, you are able to manage the networking and security layers in house as well as decide how you want to allocate compute and storage resources to workloads. Cloud then becomes the place to deploy less important applications or temporary and transient workloads.

Cloud should be about flexibility; therefore the ability to move off a Cloud platform should be as easy as the decision and ability to move onto it. Customers often express hesitation due to the uncertainty of what is actually running the Cloud service and the uncertainty of knowing what the user impact will be when they want to move to another provider or back on premise.

All of this is why we chose an industry leading virtualization platform with a Cloud Control panel that allows us to offer this kind of flexibility and control. In many instances, we are providing more control in the Cloud environment than the customer has on premise.

True Cloud adoption is never going to become mainstream until there is no difference in control or flexibility of an environment, whether it is on premise or in the Cloud. Therein lies the challenge for Cloud providers and why we seem to be experiencing such rapid growth.