Hybrid cloud top option for customers

Ross Bentley says hybrid offerings are more suitable for many than public or private cloud

A strategic business plan is needed to migrate 100 per cent of a company's IT services from its secured datacentres to the cloud.

Elements that will need to be transferred include: all corporate email accounts, internal and public-facing web sites, third-party and bespoke corporate applications, intellectual property and sensitive customer data, company databases, and all corporate user accounts that use corporate networks.

Understandably, this leaves many companies nervous and wondering about the safest cloud adoption plan. And what will be the impact in terms of cost?

Cloud can mean so many different things. In the shared public cloud, shared public hosting (cloud) providers may allow anyone to sign up using an email address and after they have outlined their initial and expected computing, data and transfer requirements.

Questions asked of the customer form the basis of an elastic computing model that allows the hosted service to expand and contract dynamically, in terms of computing power and by cost, per a company's computing, data and transfer requirements.

Many companies are concerned about the accountability and responsibility of public cloud providers. Who is accountable for securing and backing up your customer's data, where is the data actually located, and who is responsible for ensuring 99.99 per cent uptime of your customer's critical data and systems?

Most public cloud providers offer a service level agreement promising 99.99 per cent availability. However, many only provide service credits, instead of monetary compensation if it is not achieved.

Only a few weeks ago, a major public cloud provider's service crashed, losing lots of data belonging to multiple customers. Many of the customers were reportedly told that their data had been lost forever.

If your customer is moving 100 per cent to the cloud, company IT budgets move from fixed capital expenditure to a dynamic operational expenditure. There will be no more fixed IT budgets, year to year or even day to day.

There may be an inflection point where the operational cost of hosting your customer's environment in the public cloud is higher than the capital cost of on-premise hosting. This inflection point will be different for every company. It may even be reached within 12 months – and because of how elastic computing is billed, it may be extremely difficult to accurately measure the time-frame.

Private cloud is essentially the traditional approach to providing IT services, where these services are hosted on-premise or in corporate-owned datacentres. Private cloud may provide a company with a way to alter its computing, data and transfer requirements as required. It can reduce the need for hardware, lowering operational costs, but it is business as usual for the customer's IT department, which remains accountable and responsible for securing and backing up the critical systems.

Your customer will still have to buy, deploy and maintain the offering, and this means there will be a large up-front capital cost, with – potentially – a lower ongoing cost.

I believe that hybrid is the better option in many cases. Hybrid cloud offerings can offer the flexibility of the public cloud and the accountability of private cloud, seamlessly integrating both as your customer's requirements change.

Users can securely access on-premise sensitive data via a hosted public cloud application, while every service is centrally controlled, monitored and reported by your customer, enabling your customer to decide which IT services should be moved to and from the public cloud as and when it wishes.

I think this represents the very essence of cloud computing. I also feel that once your customer has tested the waters via hybrid cloud, many initial worries about cloud adoption will be eradicated. The benefits are total control and complete business flexibility.

Ross Bentley is technical director at Assist