Examining IT infrastructure: Over the past 20 years, the public cloud has gone from an ambitious, but unproven, infrastructure newcomer to a hugely successful and influential global trend
By 2028, it is expected to become a trillion-dollar market, with organisations relying on a wide variety of services to deliver their computing needs.
Widespread cloud adoption across public sector organisations illustrates the point, with the UK government adopting a ‘Cloud First’ policy back in 2013. The requirements of this approach are unequivocal: “When procuring new or existing services, public sector organisations should default to Public Cloud first, using other solutions only where this is not possible. This approach is mandatory for central government and strongly recommended to the wider public sector.” As a result, the UK public sector has spent billions on cloud services in the last decade, including nearly £3 billion in 2021-2022 alone, according to reports.
Fast forward to this year, however, and some of the shortcomings of an ‘all-in’ approach to public cloud procurement have become an issue of growing concern. Government documents seen by The Register, for example, highlight the problems created by vendor lock-in and the enormous commitment made by public sector organisations to AWS and Azure. This has led to fears that the government will end up with “minimal leverage over pricing and product options”.
Of course, vendor lock-in issues are nothing new. By continually adopting cloud over many years and placing too much reliance on narrow technology choices, many organisations have found themselves stuck with vendors and solutions that no longer serve their needs or soaring costs they can’t escape from. Given the rapid pace of innovation and change across the technology ecosystem, this restrictive inflexibility can quickly become counterproductive or even damaging to organisational effectiveness and budgets.
Striking the right balance for IT infrastructure
Given the global public cloud market’s dominance and continued growth, how can technology decision-makers strike a better balance that delivers the benefits of the public cloud without shortcomings?
Enter the hybrid ‘cloud also’ approach – a strategy currently seeing the most growth within private sector organisations. This approach embraces a variety of infrastructure solutions based on specific use cases and needs that include a combination of on-premises technologies, hybrid and multi-cloud service adoption, and public cloud services.
The central argument in favour of ‘cloud also’ is that it gives IT leaders leeway to select the right technologies for each requirement, including considerations of data sovereignty and data security. This includes the option to repatriate data and/or workloads from the public cloud to other platforms to deliver the right balance of price/performance and data security that organisations are looking for.
The momentum behind cloud repatriation raises some important points. Data published last year by IDC, for example, suggests that between 70% and 80% of companies are “repatriating at least some data back from public cloud each year.” While many of the core arguments in favour of cloud adoption – such as elasticity and flexibility – remain valid, compelling options are available today with in-house on-premises solutions in addition to the public cloud. With a growing choice of good alternatives, repatriation has become more commonplace.
Moreover, the headline cost benefits of public cloud aren’t always as evident post-adoption. There are, for example, real risks of overspending and increasing concern about the costs associated with data egress. Issues such as these have led Ofcom to refer the cloud industry to the Competition and Markets Authority for further investigation, with egress fees, discounts, and technical barriers to switching cited as “features which Ofcom is most concerned about”. Add this to a challenging economic environment, and IT leaders are reminded to look at their entire cost base to identify inefficiencies and the scope for savings. In many organisations, the public cloud now contributes significantly to that cost base.
For those mindful of these issues and considering their options, the ‘cloud also’ approach is becoming particularly attractive. Organisations that are considering deploying workloads and applications, for example, now have the option of implementing their on-prem cloud solutions based on their servers and storage. Armed with the ability to quickly increase or reduce performance or capacity and retain control over their data, they can benefit from having certain data and workloads remain on-premises.
Driven by these factors, ‘cloud also’ is likely to gain momentum in the years ahead. For those who can strike the right balance across their specific needs, ‘cloud also’ hybrid cloud solutions will deliver on their IT and business objectives.
This piece was written and provided by Roland Rosenau, SE Director EMEA at Quantum
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