It seems like just yesterday cloud was a brave new frontier just waiting to move our workloads to. Cloud promised incredible simplicity, and movement of our effort from managing infrastructure to managing applications. Believe it or not AWS launched its first service in March of 2006, nearly 14 years ago! At first AWS was pretty limited, but over time it has become the 500lb gorilla in the cloud space. Shortly after AWS picked up steam Microsoft and others made significant investment into the space. As we sit in 2019 the 2018 numbers are in, Gartner has reported that AWS has about 50% Market Share, while Microsoft is around 15%, everyone else seems to be table scraps. Goldman Sachs has some more updated market share info to the right.
You may be asking yourself how has this worked out for all those cloud plans? Turns out that it’s an “it depends” answer. Cloud has become a very ambiguous term, it has sort of landed on; anything that a company provides as a service, where the customer doesn’t own or manage the physical infrastructure. We’ve all seen the acronyms SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc.
Based on my experience working with customers looking for a strategy I have a few opinions/observations I’ll share.
Cloud has incredibly strong adoption among start-up companies
Many companies that have legacy systems in place have oscillated between cloud and on-premise, and have landed somewhere in the middle
Most of the cloud adoption we see is in the “data management” and storage space
Start-up’s
I don’t think I’m breaking any ground here by saying Start-up companies adopt cloud quicker. It makes sense. The ability to turn on a service by swiping a credit card, without any need for onsite infrastructure is what attracts them to this model. It makes the initial investment low, while providing a rich tool set for the users to be productive. Microsoft Office 365 is probably the most popular in this area
What we’re finding is, as these companies scale the cloud becomes challenging in some aspects. We work with Biotech companies that start small, but then once science comes into play things get tricky. Instruments need to consume data, and need very low latency. We see some storage come back onsite at this point. You can apply these types of principals to nearly every industry vertical.
Bottom line here is that a hybrid solution works best when your company comes out of it’s infancy, but cloud certainly gives you a leg up when you’re getting started.
Legacy Systems
Like it or not legacy systems still exist. If you look at financial institution and healthcare those systems are going to stay around for quite some time. It’s just not feasible to run those systems in the cloud yet. We also see massive amounts of storage in these companies that are great candidates for the cloud. Analytic data getting archived to cheap and deep storage is a great use case for cloud. Even analysis computing power is a good cloud use case if it’s coming online sporadically. We are still seeing some systems that remain on premise to service basic computer functions. As a good example you might be running Azure AD but you’re going to want to have that HP DL360 onsite running as a read-only domain controller, providing NPS services for 802.1x authentication.
What services are people using in the cloud
After talking with many of our customers we are seeing the heaviest adoption of cloud in two areas.
First we see strong adoption of SaaS based applications. Things like Office 365, Salesforce, Workday, etc. They are easiest to consume and skip the step of hosting infrastructure somewhere. It brings you an application as a service instead of moving infrastructure workloads to the cloud, you are paying for the result of an application to do a specific set of tasks.
Second we see a lot of our customers utilizing the cloud for long term archive storage. Backup products nearly all support using an S3 archive target. You treat that storage kind of like tape and get it offsite without the worry of having to store tapes with iron mountain. We also see research/data companies storing legacy data repositories out there that they may need to grab a small piece of data out of.
What should I do?
My best recommendation is to get a company knowledgeable about your options and discuss what your needs are. Understanding your companies needs is first and foremost. After the infrastructure and application requirements have been set your partner can advise you on your options. There are many pitfalls to working with both private and public cloud, so let us help you navigate those options. SnowCap can help you assess and choose the right cloud, whether it’s public or private. We can also offer options to operationalize on premise cloud options with OEM programs like HPE’s Greenlake which can offer cloud like pricing for on premise workloads. This will allow you to have a cloud like financial model for even your legacy on premise systems, or storage requiring low latency on premise capabilities.
