The big cloud debate- F5 Networks

The big cloud debate – private, public or hybrid?

By Rob Malkin ?Managing Director F5 Networks-ANZ

I’ve spent the last year speaking to organisations across Australia and New Zealand about their journey to the cloud. 

A recent study by ServiceNow found that 91% of mid-to-senior level IT professionals at large businesses in Australia felt cloud could be a replacement for a formal IT department – ahead of other countries globally. This trend is echoed in New Zealand, which is also very mature in terms of cloud adoption.

We’ve seen the same thing internally – data from our annual State of Application Delivery report shows that 80% of organisations globally are committed to multi-cloud architectures, and 20% will have over half their applications running in the public and/or private clouds this year. 

However, we’re realising that ‘cloud’ isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. In fact, we know of several organisations that have scaled back their use of public clouds when costs spiralled or there were service outages.

So if public cloud isn’t always the best approach, what is? The answer is hybrid cloud. 

To reflect this, cloud providers are shifting to a hybrid message. Microsoft’s Azure Stack is pitched at organisationswho want flexibility over where workloads are housed, andAWS has a partnership with VMware with a similar value proposition.

Multi-cloud environments still present hurdles though, such as managing application services, inconsistent security policies and the pressure placed on IT teams to manage complex environments. To support organisations looking for cloud environments that will empower them to deliver apps to their end-users with increased uptime, we’ve just launched new solutions which provide consistent application services in multi-cloud environments – giving companies greater deployment flexibility, more effective security, and faster time to market.

The debate around which cloud is right for your organisation, as well as how to manage this from a practical perspective, and the business benefits of each option will be a key topic I’ll be covering at our Agility conference in Sydney next week. The journey to the cloud isn’t over yet!