Cloud Hosting

By Gary Thome, VP and Chief Engineer, HPE Software-Defined and Cloud Group

People who bet on horse races know that the most reliable information about a horse will come from those who are closest to that horse -- a trainer or someone working in the stable. The idiom, straight from the horses mouth, implies that someone has gotten even better information a tip from the horse itself!

Over the past two months, Ive been writing articles about common public cloud concerns and why hybrid IT gives you the right mix of public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises solutions. Of course, I dont expect you to take my word for it. But maybe you will take advice from those who tried public cloud and have since moved to hybrid IT.

In this article, Ive complied a few quotes from a variety of organizations of all sizes and industries. Each has experienced public cloud and now has moved to hybrid IT. So here you go advice that is straight from the horses mouth:

Public cloud performance issues

Were moving some of our web infrastructure workloads back to our own data center. Performance was the big issue. Lack of communication from our public cloud provider led to a customer-facing outage we could not have prevented. Now were seriously rethinking our entire cloud strategy and are moving more workloads back on-prem. Social media company

Were bringing back apps that we had put on the public cloud and didnt go as planned because of reduced performance when compared to when they were on-prem. That said, there are other apps we feel are truly more cloud-ready, and were trying those out in the cloud so we can have what we deem to be a truly hybrid solution. Financial Services company

Public cloud cost concerns

We opted to be bleeding-edge and move to cloud when storage and hypervisor license costs were on the climb. It seemed to be a better way to keep costs in an opex mode and know what they were. That worked slightly at first. We used a lot of IaaS and SaaS within AWS. As we grew, the usage did too and the bills grew far faster. We honestly reached a tipping point when billing started to approach $100,000 per month. We had good financial outcomes moving on-prem with a hybrid solution so we can access cloud when we choose. We now have two times the horsepower on-prem for half the cost. Social Media company

One of the biggest issues driving declouding for us is that, to be honest, the initial move to the public cloud was done willy-nilly. We moved the workloads and then we moved the apps to run off those workloads. But we didnt really think about how to stage properly, how to control usage costs, and how to design an exit strategy. We quickly learned that cloud costs were far higher than we expected. Retail company

Public cloud control concerns

Flexibility is important. With a private cloud, we get the control and flexibility of a dedicated environment thats tailor-made to address our specific IT needs. For fast-growing companies like ours with constantly changing requirements, a private cloud offers more flexibility to adapt and evolve as the company changes. Social Media company

The data we hosted on AWS was growing exponentially, as all data does, and that increased costs. Public cloud hosting served its purpose when we entered the all-cloud (for the most part) approach, but then you hit this point where it doesnt make financial or operational sense any longer, when the same thing can be accomplished on-prem for less money and less hassle. Having the workloads back on-site gave us better control over usage, and we could better see spikes in activity. Public Sector company

The benefits of Hybrid IT

Many businesses have already started to move beyond the public cloud into a new era of hybrid IT that combines public cloud, private cloud and traditional IT. New offerings such as hyperconverged and composable infrastructure offer cloud-like capabilities on-premises solutions that can provide businesses more control, greater performance, less cost, and less risk than many public cloud options. A combination of on-premises, software-defined options within a private cloud seamlessly combined with public cloud lets businesses build the best possible infrastructure for their individual workloads.

The lower cost of storage, servers, and even better servers that require less hypervisor licenses made it less costly than it once was to scale out a data center or private cloud on-site. Energy company

Organizations all over the world are taking a closer look at their applications and deciding which ones should be in the public cloud and which ones should remain on traditional IT or a private cloud. Although performance, cost and control issues are all relevant, you should also consider the business model of each workload in your decision.

HPE has assembled an array of resources to help you transition to a brand-new hybrid IT world. You can learn more about HPE composable infrastructure powered by Intel by reading the e-book,HPE Synergy for Dummies, or learn about HPEs approach to hybrid cloud by checking out the HPE website,Project New Hybrid IT Stack. And to find out how HPE can help you determine a workload placement strategy that meets your service level agreements, visitHPE Pointnext.

The rest is here:
From Public Cloud to Hybrid IT Straight From the Horse's Mouth - InfoWorld