The False Dichotomy of Public Cloud vs. On-premises
Hybrid IT, Colocation in Data Centers
The move to cloud vs on-premises is a false dichotomy. There is another choice – the on-demand data center.
Cloud-first policies are being put in place by enterprises everywhere eager to migrate out of on-premises data centers deemed too costly and slow to provision and maintain. From CFOs balancing budgets to the Federal Government wanting to accelerate the pace of adoption, the public cloud appears to be the place to be. But it’s not always that straightforward.
Public cloud clearly delivers significant benefits from an OpEx consumption model and the flexibility to meet business demands with instant provisioning of infrastructure and extra capacity. There is no need for onsite data center staff and often there are no long-term contracts. But there are downsides as well.
Despite its obvious benefits, public cloud’s shared infrastructure remains a point of contention for many due to concerns about performance, outages or service degradations that are out of their control. Additionally, some applications just are not architected properly for the cloud while other steady state workloads cost a small fortune when moved to the cloud.
Adopting a cloud-first strategy can also be riddled with security challenges. After all, you’ve already vetted, invested in and regularly audit your security stack on-premises. Your team has been trained and systems checked. You own and control dedicated infrastructure. How will you piece together security consistently in a multi-tenant environment?
The on-demand data center
There is a false dichotomy that your choices are simply public cloud or on-premises. There is another option emerging – on-demand data center – that delivers the agility and scale of cloud, with the control, and security of dedicated infrastructure.
On-demand colocation is the ability to point, click and provision connectivity, compute, storage, and on-demand within a colocation data center. Based on a software-powered data center architecture, on-demand colocation offers a broad range of colocation and connectivity services in minutes.
It’s an alternative to cloud or on-premises that meets the needs of organizations that want to take advantage of on-demand deployment and consumption, speed time to market and run “headless” data center operations but avoid the risks and loss of control associated with public cloud platforms. It also ensures consistent security is possible without new investments or architectural changes.
Look for future blogs on the options and solutions you can choose that meet your needs for flexibility and control. You’re not limited to just cloud or on-premises solutions.
Views and opinions expressed in our blog posts are those of the employees who made them and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Company. A reader should not unduly rely on any statements made therein.
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