Hyperscale Cloudapalooza

Walking the well-trafficked halls of O’Hare, I was keenly aware of ad bombardment. Every wall and overhang seemed to feature glossy posters for a next gen firewall, spam filter, database solution, CRM, you name it. Most of these ads were small and would go largely unnoticed outside of an IT audience. What did not go unnoticed, however, were the giant Amazon Web Services banners extolling the virtues of AWS in the banking and insurance industries. It is no secret that cloud adoption has lagged in these traditionally on-prem holdouts, but this got me thinking: is someone putting their shoes back on after clearing security, seeing this banner, and deciding then and there that hyper-scale public cloud is the answer?

No, of course not! This is a war for mind share fought and funded by Microsoft and Amazon. Little wonder then that you’re likely to consider the two dominant public cloud players as part of your cloud strategy. As someone focused on helping customers clarify and define this strategy, I’ve been in many meetings where I’ve walked them back from the public cloud ledge. This isn’t to say that unmanaged public cloud isn’t a good fit in some cases, but matching the IT strategy to the appropriate cloud resources is critical to determining the correct path.

Am I Just Moving the Problem?
Lifting and shifting resources is not a new phenomenon. It was done on a smaller scale when virtual computing came into vogue (P to V, anyone?) and it is being done now in public cloud. A lift-and-shift isn't always bad but can completely wipe out the IaaS advantages including on-demand scalability, reduction of IT resources committed to the application, and cost. In fact, you may find that you’re still monitoring, patching, managing, and securing the solution as if it was in your own data center. Couple that with a potential lack of cloud-awareness in the legacy application and you will be just running the same app in the same fashion somewhere else. For legacy applications, I tend to advise customers to look at managed services, managed colocation, or some combination that frees up IT while still respects the legacy nature of the application.

Go Hybrid or Go Home
Azure has the best hybrid public cloud story, full stop. Where AWS is focused on hyperscale IaaS, Azure is addressing this demand while also focusing on a service stack geared towards solving internal IT challenges. DR, backup, IdAM, and IoT solutions are among these hybrid offerings, and many are perfect options for organizations not looking to make a full cloud commitment just yet. It’s myopic to say that Azure will address all your on prem woes, but for the right workloads and use cases it can be an incredibly powerful solution. For example, want to keep your physical and virtual systems protected while also providing a potential public cloud migration path? Azure has you covered through its Site Recovery solution. Born-in-the-cloud companies are outnumbered by traditional IT shops, and Microsoft is right to cater to traditional IT while also offering an on-ramp into public IaaS.

Plan to Win
What’s cloud ready? What makes sense to migrate? What should we keep in house but remotely manage? Would we be better off looking at a managed public cloud environment? Above all else, what is the financial impact of IT consumption in all of these scenarios?

These are all incredibly important questions to answer! IT knows how computing resources benefit the business, but they might not have a grasp of the optimal delivery models for those resources. This is where Cloud Planning Services helps organizations assess the present state, find the most mission-effective and cost-effective delivery model, and furnish the blueprints and financial justification for that model. Whereas most assessments are focused around diagnostics only, CPS is focused on IT transformation and not routine workload migration.

You can’t ignore those airport ads, but you can sure contextualize them!