More Choices for Cloud Adoption

Even today, only a small percentage of enterprise workloads run in the cloud. This is indicative of the fact that most organizations aren’t fully ready for cloud adoption yet. Among several reasons for keeping enterprise workloads running in “on premise” data centers, two that stand out are –

(1)?Physical control over data that is regarded highly valuable or sensitive, and

(2)??Need for at-the-edge, low latency computing, for applications that require real-time performance

Until recently, organizations constrained due to the above reasons continued to make investment into on premise equipment and could not avail the benefits of “as-a-service”.

There is a good news for such organizations, thanks to the innovative market offerings of “On Premise Cloud” (an oxymoron!) such as HPE Greenlake, AWS Outposts, Dell Apex, and CiscoPlus etc. Though there are architecture differences among them, all of them meet a common goal – bring consumption-based/cloud model to the enterprise, while preserving the benefits of on premise data center.

The vendors own the equipment deployed in customers’ premises, but unlike a simple lease, the customer only pays for the portion of total capacity that they use.

Under the Greenlake umbrella, HPE packages their popular platforms such as ProLiant/Nimble with software that includes a cloud operating system, management console and services bundle. HPE owns the maintenance and capacity-availability-performance management, providing all benefits of the cloud, financial and operational.

AWS Outposts is Amazon’s solution, brought to customers’ premises in form of nearly ready-to-use 42U data center racks. AWS Outposts run the familiar AWS services such as EC2, EBS and Elasticache etc., providing the benefit of utilizing AWS skilled resources from a large available pool.

Fortunately, choosing the on premise cloud platform that best meets an enterprise’s need isn’t very difficult. A Balanced Score Card approach that employs criteria with their weights for factors such as current skills, current investments and future cloud roadmap can greatly simplify the decision process. Once the decision is made, getting a second opinion and implementation plan along with op-ex estimate from vendor-neutral implementation partner can add great value.

Article by- Ashish Raghute- Vice President-IT at Allied Digital LLC