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There’s been a lot of “hot air” surrounding hybrid cloud, especially when the pandemic hit, many organisations were forced to determine whether to move applications and workloads to private cloud, public cloud or both (hybrid cloud).
Together with Dell Technologies, we recently hosted a webinar to explore just where organisations are in their hybrid cloud journey, where they aim to go next and unpack some of the alternate views and real-life scenarios of customers getting the best out of both (public and private cloud) worlds.
We also covered Telstra’s recently announced Private Cloud solution, discussing how private cloud may suit different desired IT outcomes.
See the recording of the webinar here.
Here are our top five key learnings:
1. “Cloud adjacency” – new kid on the block
Most organisations are still deciding which apps or workloads to migrate to the public cloud and which to maintain on-premise. It’s becoming less and less of a binary choice.
Cloud adjacency refers to the placement of data on cloud-ready hardware close to the public cloud, allowing secure interconnectivity which potentially lowers latency and networking costs – all without the need to migrate to new cloud models.
“Cloud adjacency is the one that I think should be on everyone’s lips at the moment. The reason for that is because you’re as close as you can get to the cloud that you want to be next to. What that means is you can have your data interconnect to an AWS, Azure environment or any of your chosen clouds.”
Anthony Pepin, Cloud Advisory Systems Engineer, Dell Technologies
Anthony added that organisations will soon be considering “Cloud Adjacency”, where they can get the best out of public cloud even when they cannot migrate yet, whether it’s for data sovereignty or compliance reasons.
2. Why private cloud? “It depends…”
As stated multiple times during the webinar, the choice between public and private cloud is primarily determined by the use case.
According to Andrew Austen, Cloud Solutions Specialist at Telstra, one of the main reasons customers choose private cloud is for the economies of scale – the ability to sweat out their assets. Especially when organisations have already invested capital expenditure in the assets.
When a customer has a new project that needs a burst of cloud compute and storage needs, they would already have the space to accommodate without needing to add additional licensing costs to adopt public cloud.
“What I’m seeing in the market now, why customers are still using private cloud – number one is the economies of scale using virtualisation on private cloud.”
Andrew Austen, Cloud Solutions Specialist, Telstra
3. Private cloud use continues to rise
Contrary to the perceived popularity of public cloud, our recent research on the “State of Cloud Adoption in Australia 2021” with Omdia found that 60 – 80% of companies still host most business-critical applications / workloads in a hybrid environment1.
The top critical business applications that organisations choose to remain in hybrid / private cloud were IT Management, Security Services / management, and other custom / specific applications.
“There are still a lot of customers out there still using private cloud. They don’t want the complexity of management of a data centre on premise.”
Andrew Austen, Cloud Solutions Specialist, Telstra
4. The importance of data sovereignty driving cloud decisions
“Data is the new oil” has been a cliché saying for a while. It couldn’t be more accurate for IT. In fact, it’s almost a ‘burden’ as IT is responsible for compliance to the relevant governmental law and policies in the geographies that the organisation operates in. For example, organisations can be fined in Europe if they break the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
In the context of cloud, data sovereignty drives decisions about where organisations are maintaining their data. If organisations are unable to choose the location of their data, it may influence their provider selection.
If a corporation relies primarily on a public cloud service, a hybrid cloud approach may be the most suited so that they can consume the services they require while maintaining data sovereignty in the precise scenarios where it is required. A hybrid cloud environment combines the scalability and flexibility of the public cloud with the security of the private cloud.
“We’re seeing that organisations want to keep their data in a certain location [and] keep it in a hybrid model. So they can consume the service outside of the actual environment.”
Anthony Pepin, Cloud Advisory Systems Engineer, Dell Technologies
5. Private cloud with public cloud-like benefits
Announced in October 2021, but launching 2022, the speakers delved on how Telstra Private Cloud is a great building block to form an optimised infrastructure to support business growth.
Telstra's Private Cloud, built on Dell Technologies, provides customers with a secure approach to connect data and apps that may not be suitable for public clouds, but with a managed solution that delivers scalability and predictive pricing.
“It’s great to see when our two organisations come together, customers get to consume Dell’s Technologies with Telstra in a cloud-like manner… they no longer go out and have to purchase big servers to put in their environment. They can just purchase from Telstra at a cost-per-X basis. I think that’s super, super exciting. ”
Anthony Pepin, Cloud Advisory Systems Engineer, Dell Technologies
Based on Telstra's cloud connectivity services, which provide the performance and scalability that businesses require, as well as our relationships with AWS and Microsoft Azure, customers can get all of their cloud needs handled through a single reliable partner.
[1] Telstra Purple Omdia State of Cloud Adoption Australia 2020
