Although the stated benefits of the Public Cloud can be attractive, for some workloads–especially for those that are resource-intensive in nature–the cost can be dramatically higher than deploying those workloads on-premises. There are ways to achieve many of the benefits stated by the Public Cloud providers by using alternative methods and by leveraging the more economical financial aspects of an on-premises infrastructure.
One simple way to do this is to examine the overall IT infrastructure on a workload-by-workload basis and to determine the best target environment for each. At the end of such an analysis, the IT manager has the power to decide the appropriate course of action for each individual workload, instead of being disadvantaged by a one-size-fits-all infrastructure solution. This concept of Hybrid Cloud is increasingly being accepted in the industry as offering the best possible value for IT managers.
Figure 15. Options to “Cloud-Enable” On-Premises infrastructure and workloads.
Degrees of cloud enablement can be described as follows:
- 0% cloud enablement - represents the traditional on-premises infrastructure solution.
- 10% cloud enablement – implement an on-premises infrastructure but pay for it on an operational basis instead of using capital funds. This is enabled by utilizing financial methods.
- 25% cloud enablement – the customer can take ownership of the equipment but place it in a co-location (co-lo) facility where it would be managed remotely. The benefit to the customer is avoidance of the investments in the facility required to house the equipment. This could be coupled with procuring the equipment on an operational basis.
- 50% cloud enablement – the service provider would take ownership of the equipment and not the customer, and the customer would pay the service provider on a periodic basis for what is referred to as a “bare metal service”. The customer would be responsible for system administration of the remote environment.
- 75% cloud enablement – if the customer also wants someone else to perform systems administration on the equipment at a co-location facility, then it is possible to pass this responsibility also to the service provider. This reduces the customer’s requirement to hire and maintain staff resources to perform system administration.
- 90% cloud enablement – instead of a “bare metal service”, a service provider could provide a fully managed software stack which provides an entire working and managed environment and is targeted at providing developers with a turnkey modern application development environment.
- 100% cloud enablement – represents the full Public Cloud solution in this example.