As I discussed in my last blog, “The State of the Cloud,” the cloud conversation within enterprises has shifted from How should we do it? to Why should we do it?
Enterprise leaders need to create a competitive advantage for their business, and the cloud can help them become more lean, agile, and innovative—provided they align their cloud initiatives with their business goals.
At Rolta AdvizeX, we talk to a lot of enterprises, and all of them agree that the cloud is not a trend but the IT platform of the future. Yet it’s not the best platform for everything—at least not yet. Enterprises need to be selective about how and where they use the cloud to help their business. Here are eight ways that we see the cloud being used today by enterprises. Are they the right fit for your business? Talk to us to find out.
Backup in the Cloud
The long-term retention (LTR) of data has often been problematic. In the past, many enterprises put their archived data on tape to save money, only to have to re-buy old-model tape drives and deal with corruption issues when they needed to access that data years later. By storing LTR data in the cloud leveraging technologies like EMC CloudBoost, enterprises can store old data cheaply and access it quickly.
Disaster Recovery (DR) in the Cloud
This can be a real cost-saver for an enterprise. Before the cloud, enterprises needed to essentially create a duplicate data center for DR: servers, storage, network capacity, etc. Then they had to deal with operational nightmare of replicating not only data, but also configuration. With the cloud, they can create the same environment in an offsite location and cut their costs dramatically.
“Lift and Shift”
In some cases, moving everything into the cloud does make sense. This is more of a pure Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) play, where virtual machines are migrated from the customer’s datacenter to the cloud. It allows enterprises to move the complexity of managing and owning the infrastructure onto the shoulders of a cloud provider.
Hybrid Clouds
This is less a use case than an environment, but a hybrid mix of public and private clouds can give enterprises the right mix of flexibility (private) and scalability (public). Plus, there are always occasions where an enterprise may want to hold back some data from a public platform—for example, a retailer that may not feel comfortable moving its customer data into an Amazon cloud environment could feel more comfortable moving it into a hybrid environment like VirtuStream.
Big Data
Cloud and Big Data arrived at around the same time, and the two technologies have shown some real synergies in terms of handling complex analyses in real time at massive scale. There are even cloud-based big data applications available that allow enterprises to ramp up real-time analytics in days versus months.
An Instant “Yes” to the Business
With the cloud, IT can say “yes” to developers and application owners who need instant resources to test and launch new apps. No more waiting for IT to acquire and deploy technology resources before application projects can start. If the project is successful IT can migrate it back to a private cloud to ensure the proper levels of security, availability, and management. If the project is unsuccessful, simply turn it off.
Quality Assurance (QA) Development and Testing
Because you can easily turn up (and turn off) resources in the cloud, some enterprises are using the cloud for QA testing and development. Over the long haul, the “pay for what you use” model can result in considerable savings and allow enterprises to beef up their QA and testing environment.
Cloud-Native Apps
The new wave of technology is making it easier to design and deploy apps that take advantage of both IaaS and PaaS. EMC’s Native Hybrid Cloud takes that idea a step further by allowing developers to easily design and deploy apps in a native cloud environment right from the beginning.
Of course, enterprises still need to decide how to implement these solutions in the cloud. Do they house them in their own private cloud, move them into a public environment, or bridge the two to combine the best parts of security and low-cost scalability? I’ll answer that question in my next blog, “Cloud Leverage: What It Is and Why You Need It.” ▪