With IT expertise being in short supply, it is no surprise that many myths about public cloud migration are taken as fact. Some believe that the cloud brings instant digital transformation all by itself and is the solution for all IT requirements, while others think the challenges of migration outweigh the benefits. To set the record straight, here we will fact check five of the most common public cloud migration myths enterprises hear today.
Public cloud is an all or nothing option
Some people believe that migrating to the public cloud is an all or nothing option, i.e., that if an enterprise wants to adopt cloud technology, it will have to move its entire IT operations online. While a lot of businesses have undertaken lock, stock and barrel migrations, it is not essential. Most businesses continue to use a combination of solutions, including dedicated servers, private cloud and the public cloud, and there are management tools available that enable these different solutions to work harmoniously together.
What is important is that enterprises use the most effective solutions for each of their workloads and making the right decision depends on factors such as cost, availability, security and compliance, reliability, speed and performance. The best option for one task isn’t necessarily right for another and companies need to carefully consider the range of solutions available.
The public cloud is mainly for data storage
Is the public cloud ideal for data storage? In many cases, yes. Is that its main function? Certainly not. It is true that a lot of enterprises use the public cloud for storing data. Compared to purchasing in-house dedicated servers, using the infrastructure of a public cloud vendor is much more cost-efficient, easily scalable, 100% available and highly secure. It is not for everyone, though: highly regulated organisations that store sensitive data, such as those in healthcare and law enforcement, often prefer to use a single-tenancy solution, like private cloud, for storing personal data, as it helps them with compliance.
Data storage is only one of many reasons to adopt the public cloud. Its high availability, on-demand scalability and internet access make it ideal for a wide range of uses. For example, it is perfect for websites and customer-facing applications that need to be online 24/7 and which require scalability to cope with unexpected spikes in demand. It’s also ideal for big data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, automation, IoT, remote working, disaster recovery and many other workloads, especially as many of the new applications being developed for these are cloud-native and open source.
Public cloud always offers the best pricing and performance
Unbeatable performance and cost savings are often touted as the chief benefits of public cloud migration. To some extent, this is true, but not in all circumstances. With no in-house hardware to purchase and a pay-as-you-go fee structure, the cloud does provide considerable cost-effectiveness that for most users translates to significant savings. However, this depends on what the company’s IT needs are. The private cloud can also reduce costs, as can continuing to use existing in-house infrastructure while it is still fit for purpose. And while pay-as-you-go pricing is generally cost-effective, companies need to manage their usage carefully to ensure costs do not exceed budgets.
When it comes to performance, vendors invest heavily in hardware and networking to ensure that public cloud customers have the infrastructure needed to deliver performance that is more than adequate for the vast majority of workloads. However, at Hyperslice, besides offering high-performance public cloud, we can build and configure dedicated servers to customer specifications and, if required, these can deliver greater performance than public cloud servers.
On-demand services need public cloud solutions
The public cloud does provide an excellent environment in which to deploy on-demand services, however, it is not the only solution that enterprises can adopt. One alternative is on-demand, pay-per-use private cloud, while many companies have opted for a multi-cloud approach, working with a variety of vendors. This approach gives enterprises full control over their IT infrastructure, ensuring individual workloads are configured to deliver optimum performance, reliability and flexibility, while ensuring security and cost-effectiveness.
Investment in on-site infrastructure gets wasted
When a service is migrated from in-house data centres to the public cloud, the on-site infrastructure is no longer needed for that purpose. This, however, does not mean previous capital investment in on-site hardware is wasted. Many businesses time their migrations in order to get maximum value from on-site hardware, moving when they would be retiring their servers.
For those with a more urgent need to migrate, this is often done in phases, meaning only a proportion of in-house hardware becomes redundant at any time. When this happens, that hardware can be reused, perhaps replacing older, in-house servers or being used as an on-site backup facility that the company can switch to if there is a disaster. There are a range of useful purposes to which this hardware can be put and, if not, it can always be sold, recycled or donated.
Conclusion
IT solutions come in many forms and the public cloud is only one of the options available to enterprises today. Aside from dedicated servers, there are also private, hybrid and multi-cloud solutions to choose from. The priority is to deploy the best solution for each of the operations or applications they need to run. Today, many enterprises find value in working with a trusted managed IT solutions partner, like Hyperslice, that offers the expertise, infrastructure and ongoing support needed to find and deploy the right solutions.
For more information, visit Hyperslice.com
