It’s easy to get locked into a technology, but it’s better to consider your options. Cloud first shouldn’t mean cloud only, and when you do pick cloud, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the public cloud.
Pick Cloud for the Right Reasons
Although cost is always a factor in technology selection, in most cases it shouldn’t be the driving consideration. Justify cloud based on what the technology can do for your business beyond costs: the agility, scalability, and, possibly, security of cloud. Even when cloud has savings, you need to balance that against the costs of getting there; a new application is likely to need existing data which may not be in the cloud yet and may be difficult to migrate.
Choose Public or Private Cloud
The “default” cloud is public, but it’s getting easier to build a private cloud, and that’s a real choice to consider. Microsoft Azure Stack, Red Hat Cloud Suite, and other products all let you build your own cloud. For many companies, the anticipated cost savings of cloud are difficult to realize as applications scale up and new resources are brought online. Bringing a private cloud into the data center gives you many of the benefits of public cloud while providing more control over both costs and security.
Choose Not to Use Cloud
Just because you can use a cloud doesn’t mean you ought to. Some projects should continue to use conventional, on-premises infrastructure. These projects often require integration with legacy applications or datasets that haven’t been migrated to the cloud. Some projects with strict latency requirements are also better served from internal resources.
Making the “to cloud or not to cloud” decision every time, rather than defaulting to cloud only, means realizing your infrastructure decisions aren’t really about infrastructure. They’re about your workloads, the data and applications that are what your business really cares about. When you understand who the application’s users are and whether it’s critical to the entire organization, to a departmental business function, or if it isn’t critical at all can provide the guidance needed to choose the best environment for workloads on a case-by-case basis.
VAST IT Services offers IT strategy services to help organizations evaluate their technology needs and make strategic choices. Our partnerships with the big-three public cloud providers, plus numerous other top-tier technology vendors, allow us to design solutions that meet your needs in every environment. Contact us to learn more about making and implementing the right technology decisions for your business.
