A More Holistic Approach to Cloud

In his recent eWEEK article on how cloud environments will change over the next few years, Chris Preimesberger cites a survey from IDC which found that “that 20 percent of IT decision-makers reported they will return on-premises, while 43 percent want to move to an on-prem private cloud, and 37 percent are likely going to move to a hosted private cloud.”[1]

This aligns with the trends that we’ve seen in the market, which is a more holistic and hybrid approach to cloud.  

Numerous industry studies have been conducted to determine the current state of workload migration to public clouds. While no consensus has been reached, research indicates between 18% to 32% of existing workloads have been migrated to public clouds, with a year-over-year migration rate between 2% and 6% through 2020.

Many of these workloads could benefit from hybrid cloud services that deliver cloud-based benefits in an environment that still supports the on-premise requirements some of these workloads have – compliance, regulations, governance, network latency, data transport costs, etc.

Preimesberger’s sentiment was echoed by IDC Chief Analyst Frank Gens, who, at last week’s IDC Directions conference in Boston, predicted that 30% of all the IT systems in enterprise data centers and edge locations will be running public cloud-sourced services. [2]

“These are becoming the stacks that matter,” Gens said. “These are what enterprises need to integrate and align with in our own data centers.”

This is why I have been very vocal that one of the key principals of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is to protect companies’ existing investments. CIOs don’t want to throw out years of traditional  infrastructure and the customer applications running on top. Through our deep knowledge of on-premise enterprise applications and databases, Oracle delivers hybrid functionality to workloads that are not yet ready to undergo a full migration or may always run in a bimodal existence. Our hybrid offerings reduce operational overhead and deliver cloud scale and agility through services such as Exadata at Customer (formerly Cloud at Customer), Private Regions (coming soon!), FastConnect, Storage Gateway, and Data Backup and Archiving.

 These solutions are ideal in situations where customer workloads must remain on-premise due to:

• Regulations or compliance requirements
• Latency-sensitive workloads that can’t tolerate delays due to limited network connectivity or bandwidth
• Data transport costs

In addition to protecting them, it is also crucial to extend those existing investments. That is why back in December we launched the Oracle Cloud Native Framework, which offers a rich set of cloud native on-premises software and cloud native managed services with Oracle Linux Cloud Native Environment and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. This ensures that developers have a cloud native solution that spans on premises, hybrid and public cloud deployments.

As my colleague Bob Quillin wrote at the time, “Since the framework is based on open, CNCF certified, conformant standards it will not lock you in - applications built on the Oracle Cloud Native Framework are portable to any Kubernetes conformant environment – on any cloud or infrastructure.”

Many enterprise customer’s workloads will remain on-premise for at least the foreseeable future. Oracle’s Hybrid Cloud offerings extend managed cloud capabilities to the customers’ datacenters, delivering value on-premise, with the ability to integrate deeply with the customer’s IT systems and applications and leverage public cloud where it makes sense.

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[1] IDC, Cloud Repatriation Accelerates in a Multicloud World, doc #US44185818, Aug 2018

[2] IDC, Multiplied Innovation: Scaling a Technology Revolution, doc #DR2019_GS1_FG, March 2019