Once you’ve tasted cloud agility, it’s difficult to go back to racks and stacks. But there’s a better way to get the benefits of the cloud without all of the risks: private cloud.
In fact, there are four clear-cut reasons to consider a private cloud migration:
- regaining control;
- optimizing data and compute workload placement;
- improving cloud data governance; and
- better cost management and optimization.
Pros and Cons of Public Cloud
Growth of public cloud use amongst global enterprises has been considerable the past few years. In fact, the amount of enterprise IT spending on public cloud computing will increase by 18.4% this year to a total of $304.9 billion, according to Gartner.
And it’s not hard to understand why. The cloud makes it easier to deploy software, scale to meet demand, and manage or troubleshoot issues. It allows enterprises to convert capital expenses into more manageable operating expenses. And it provides developers significantly more agility and flexibility through APIs and automation.
Although embracing an agile infrastructure is a very good thing, there are a number of significant downsides when that infrastructure not under your direct purview:
- If your cloud provider doesn’t offer the specific configuration you need for a specific workload, you may be out of luck.
- Multi-tenancy: Although you can provision dedicated instances, to truly take advantage of the scalability offered through the cloud, you don’t want to utilize instances that can’t be quickly and easily replicated where needed. Doing so undermines the very elastic nature of cloud resources.
- Regulations: For example, the CLOUD Act allows a foreign government, through reciprocal agreements with the United States, to gain access to your cloud-based data. And they don’t even have to tell you about it.
Reasons for Migrating to Private Cloud
A private cloud migration can help you capitalize on public cloud’s benefits without taking on the risks of public cloud infrastructure. Developers still interact with the infrastructure in the same agile way — with APIs, without having to worry about the underlying hardware — but it all lives on-premises.
Regaining Control
Whether it’s having to share your cloud footprint with other businesses or being at the mercy of the cloud provider to provision your capacity, having your data in your cloud means that you have complete control over your infrastructure. You can fill it with the specific images, containers and configurations that your applications and employees need. Because it’s your hardware, you can use whatever resources you need: specialized GPUs, DPUs, IPUs and more. And although it’s a trade off, control vs. convenience, migrating from public to private cloud also ensures better cost optimization.
Optimizing Workload Placement
Where are your applications deployed? Where is your data stored? When you employ a public cloud provider, the answers to those questions are regional distinctions: West, East, South. And moving data between regions, or utilizing multiple regions, can drive cloud costs way up. What’s more, quick access to data and compute resources can have a meaningful impact on the user experience and even productivity. With a private cloud, you can deploy your resources where they are really needed.
And don’t forget that you have control not only over the cloud infrastructure itself, but also over how it integrates with your other network resources. You can completely isolate it (which is helpful when you’re concerned specifically about cloud data governance) or connect it to MPLS networks, SD-WAN, specific internet service providers (ISPs) and even interconnection fabrics.
Improving Cloud Data Governance
Data governance is on the tip of every company’s tongue. It’s difficult to ensure that data is safe, secured, managed, and compliant with regulations when you are employing public cloud resources. Think about that CLOUD Act again. If your data is in the public cloud, it can be accessed by foreign governments without your knowledge. But if it’s in your own private cloud? You have a much better handle on your cloud data governance. If you don’t want it in a certain country or region, you don’t have to store it there.
Better Cost Management and Optimization
When companies first move from static hardware to public cloud resources, they are often excited about the shift from CapEx to OpEx. The reduction in cost can be significant, but it’s short lived. There are many hidden costs within the public cloud, such as data egress. Did you know that public cloud providers charge little to nothing to get your data into their clouds but charge an arm and a leg to get it out? All the hidden charges within the public cloud can make it difficult to manage costs accurately. But with your private cloud, you know all the costs, and that provides the opportunity for much more accurate cloud cost optimization while still gaining the benefits of cloud agility.
Legacy Hardware Does Not a Private Cloud Make
As you are making the business case for private cloud migration, remember this: just because you have legacy hardware distributed across multiple data centers doesn’t mean you have a private cloud. These resources are all siloed. The compute, memory and storage isn’t shared. It’s not accessible via API or manageable through resources like Kubernetes. Sure, you can redeploy this hardware as part of a private cloud strategy, but it will need to be appropriated as such. You can’t just use it as-is.
Static hardware resources, siloed and distinct, don’t provide the kind of scalability and elasticity that developers and operators come to expect from the cloud.. But the public cloud may not be the best way to go. When you have specific business requirements, such as where data can be stored or certain functionality for your software, you don’t have the control necessary with public cloud deployments. To have total control over data access, security and storage, you can’t trust placement decisions to a public cloud provider and a multi-tenant environment.
Cloud agility doesn’t have to come at such a high cost. With a private cloud, you’ll gain significantly more control and make infrastructure costs more predictable.
If you are using the public cloud today, you may want to consider a private cloud migration. The best part? You don’t have to go it alone. Platina Systems can help you reap all the benefits of public cloud without all the work of managing on-premises infrastructure — so you can focus on making your business successful.
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