INTELLIGENT DATA CENTRES
Still, if your company isn’t using any
differentiated platforms, chances are the
cloud-based applications are good enough
and they may be easier for customers to
access. But large enterprises that may
have invested millions in developing
proprietary applications, which they use to
differentiate themselves, are not going to
the cloud in droves.
when the needs justify the expense and
risk of doing so. For example, financial
services firms that run online transaction
processing or actuarial applications will
probably take quite a few years to rewrite
these applications based on the higher risk
of change and the complexity their own
customised solutions contain.
Cloud computing
From the enterprise perspective, the
trend definitely appears to be towards the
increasing use of cloud over time. When
an organisation moves its workload to
a cloud environment, it’s different than
simply converting to virtual machines
(VMs). Enterprise datacentres support
many different applications, and this can
translate to hundreds or thousands of VMs.
It’s difficult to manage this new virtualised
environment while ensuring high security
and availability. Adding automation
and orchestration tools greatly enhance
operational efficiency and can turn multiple
VMs into a private cloud. Now resources are
agile and available for whatever workloads
the business may need to deploy.
Private and public cloud environments
differ in several ways. When a company
chooses a private cloud environment, it
has the benefit of absolute control. Internal
operating costs may be much less than the
monthly charges from using a public cloud
depending on the way datacentre services
are used. Evolving to a private cloud is a
lot easier from a security and management
perspective than moving to a public
environment; it is common practice for the
enterprise for the most part.
The public cloud is a rental
environment that offers much of the same
facilities we see in the private cloud. Here,
the next wave of applications is typically
rewritten as cloud-native applications to
run on specific types of public platforms.
Cloud vendors
have unique
ways of doing
things.
MTDCs
James Young, Director of CommScope’s Data
Center Practice in Asia Pacific.
The public cloud moves companies
completely out of the infrastructure
business, and it might offer better security
than SMEs can manage on their own.
But regulations can be an issue: the
regulatory environment hasn’t necessarily
caught up with what’s possible with the
public cloud. For some companies, there
are several regulatory hurdles to overcome
before moving to a public cloud. That’s
why many banks, for example, often host
private clouds in their own facilities.
Another downside to the public cloud
is that there’s no standardisation across
public cloud platforms. Cloud vendors
have unique ways of doing things. It can be
difficult to change to another vendor down
the road. Putting software into a different
cloud environment can be troublesome and
expensive. If you have very large datasets
in the cloud, it can be hard and expensive
to move them into another facility.
The cloud also forces managers to give
up a certain amount of control in terms
of service level agreements. If a public
cloud fails, managers have to be aware of
backup and recovery plans. Once he or
she has made a commitment to the public
cloud, it may be impossible to move back.
Will you still have resources to manage
a private environment? If you recovered
your data, where would your back-up
applications run?
MTDCs offer the ability to pay for
infrastructure as a utility rather
than running it in your on-premises
environment. Even complex enterprise
resource planning (ERP) environments,
with millions of dollars tied up in
customisation, might not justify building
and owning a private datacentre. In this
case, it may make sense for them to move
it into a hosted facility and buy space,
power, cooling and connectivity from the
MTDC. And, since it is commonplace for
major public cloud, service and content
providers to also have a presence in
MTDCs, enterprises can connect directly
to them. This can significantly reduce
latency and user experience, and simplify
their planning by having their public and
private clouds, and carrier connectivity,
under a single roof.
Choosing models
Finally, a lot of companies are using more
than one datacentre model. A company
might use the public cloud to enable
self-service access to compute resources,
for example, while it runs proprietary,
business-critical applications in an on-site
datacentre or an MTDC.
In the end, different companies have
different needs and they use different
datacentre models to meet them. There
are several alternatives available today,
and you can customise the investment
strategy and the migration path to
implement a combination of hardware/
software approaches. The cloud is
becoming more popular; MTDCs are
becoming much more capable and
regulators are trusting off-premises
solutions more. The trick is to use the best
model for the task at hand.
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