07 June 2024

In a rapidly-evolving world of interconnected networks, which cloud solution is right for your enterprise?

What are the key benefits of public vs private cloud?
Jonathan Smith, solution area expert, Net Insight: Private cloud enables us to curate exactly the architecture needed for a particular kind of workload enabling full control and allowing for increased efficiency or specialised performance. In comparison, public cloud comes with a lot of pre-baked services that accompany the basic infrastructure offering, allowing immediate access to a lot of potential features and services.

Sandip Channa, CTO, CSI Ltd: The key benefit is convenience - with public cloud there is no capital expenditure required and the billing model of pay-as-you-go is convenient. You don’t have to worry about security or resourcing.

Stewart Laing, founder and CEO, Asanti: Many businesses will be tempted by the perceived lower costs of public cloud, however it is essential that they take the time to fully understand their organisation’s requirements and the required IT systems and applications, before moving on to developing a cloud strategy that considers all costs, usability, and functionality.

Is hybrid truly the best of both worlds?
Channa: In one sense - it deals with challenges like cost optimisation, regulation and compliance, complexity, and flexibility.

The real challenge is how you migrate between two platforms. Although it is made out that the toolsets are very easy to migrate, there are lots of peripheral systems that must collaborate and connectivity between these is always a challenge. It’s all very good switching between a public hyperscaler and your own private cloud, but every time you switch there is disruption.

Hybrid cloud is the way forward to save money as you can place workloads where they are best suited based on resource requirements and to help compliance requirements. Moving data back and forth between cloud platforms is hard, and costly due to egress charges and time required by teams to manage these changes.

Organisations overlook these charges and must consider whether they outweigh the cost benefits of public cloud. People may argue the agility and scalability outweigh the other challenges, but ultimately, it’s the rightsizing and right-placement of workloads that is driving people to look at hybrid cloud.

Laing: There will be some systems that simply can’t exist in the public cloud, either because they are legacy systems or because they have stringent compliance requirements, in which case, they need to reside on a private cloud infrastructure. By looking at each application and system individually, you’ll be able to ascertain the requirements for your business and therefore develop the right hosting strategy.

Smith: A hybrid approach can often be the best of both worlds allowing for the operational optimised benefits of private with the flexibility that a public cloud provides.

If we take on the ground media production as an example, the best way to achieve the lowest latency is to harness private infrastructure, enabling the creation of a specialist network to give the optimal bandwidth that would provide the best technical result. Although when moving to the distribution of that production where the need is to extend reach away from operational hubs and venues, it’s important to take advantage of the flexibility a public cloud can provide.

The only pitfall is the increased complexity a hybrid approach brings. A hybrid approach means there is a need to create an interface between the private and public environment, requiring architectural expertise across both.

What role is hybrid multi-cloud playing in the UK?
Channa: Organisations are finding it hard to use multi-cloud platforms because of the cross of skills needed. Despite what the big providers say, their platforms require different knowledge and skill sets – it’s not as seamless as you would expect. Few IT departments have all the skills for each platform so there is often a need to use MSPs.

Smith: It’s a battleground of cloud providers which will continue to be fierce as players try to achieve better market share. If Oracle, for example, is offering attractive egress charging for their private cloud environment, you might want to exit your existing provider, but you must architect to allow this to happen easily.

The relatively small size of the UK means point of presence is not a decision-making factor — making commercial position crucial. Unique offerings will continue as providers try and position themselves more and more aggressively to grab different shares across industry segments.

Laing: Hybrid multi-cloud strategies are adopted to get the balance between infrastructure costs and compliance. We expect this blend of solutions to continue to grow as businesses grapple with the balance of costs, skillsets, legacy applications, and ever-changing business requirements, such as those brought about by the growth of AI.

Do the security risks of public and hybrid cloud outweigh the benefits?
Laing: The challenge with being in a public cloud environment is that you may have no control over where your applications or data reside. This can cause issues with data sovereignty. That’s where colocation data centres come into play because they can securely host or replace the on-premise infrastructure, providing organisations with the ability to connect to public cloud solutions appropriately via our network ‘on ramps’ to public cloud providers, ensuring security and compliance meet with scalability requirements.

Smith: In theory, a very secure private cloud environment can be created; but when you need outbound connectivity, that security becomes a risk. If you’re working in an environment where you can truly be a closed ecosystem, then potentially you can create the most secure environment without hemorrhaging flexibility and cost.

Conversely, public cloud providers give the best solution to the problem of needing ubiquitous connectivity to that environment because they have the very best practices for potential risk and mitigation.

There is also a pressing need for globalisation and consolidation. The need to centrally hold resources that multiple global entities connect to remotely is becoming more prevalent. The public cloud approach from a security perspective is immediately well-positioned to provide this connectivity, whereas to achieve the same result in a private environment, there is a steep learning curve.

Channa: Public cloud providers put huge amounts of time and money into security and it’s hard for smaller organisations to do this. So, there are some major advantages for smaller organisations to using the big providers, but for other organisations like banks who want more security around data, a hybrid cloud provides a better option.

How can an enterprise establish which cloud is right for them?
Laing: It can take 4-6 months to thoroughly assess your requirements but in doing so, will reduce costs and ensure there are no nasty surprises. There are two critical things for enterprises to do. Firstly, you need to understand what the business strategy is for the next five years. Secondly, you must carry out an honest evaluation of the resources in place and whether they meet the requirements of the business strategy.

Businesses should look to deploy appropriate cloud governance framework controls to proactively manage their cloud adoption and avoid losing control of systems, data, and cost. These controls will ensure that businesses utilise the appropriate solutions to maximise value, whether this be on-premises, hosted or public cloud.

Smith: It all comes down to the workload. From that, you identify your infrastructure and your supporting service requirements. It is also dependent on whether a business is making a long-term capital investment over a traditional 3–5-year business term, or whether this investment is a reaction to a very dynamic change in the market which requires a very flexible commercial model to meet that.

Channa: Some organisations want a specific technology from a specific cloud provider. But for 9 out of 10 decisions it will be based on the skill sets they have in-house. For example, if they know Microsoft, they’ll likely go with Azure. Organisations usually take the path of least resistance, driven by their current internal resources and their knowledge base, as it’s simpler to go with what you know.