final thought
THE END IS NOT NIGH
After key players Amazon and Microsoft announce UK based data centres , Adam Eaton , sales director at Pulsant , discusses the future of the UK based IaaS provider and why he believes it is not the last hurrah .
Gartner ’ s August 2016 Magic Quadrant of Cloud Infrastructure as a Service ( Iaas ) has two players in the leaders ’ quadrant , seven players in the niche quadrant and only one visionary . There are no prizes for guessing who the two leaders are and maybe only a small prize for guessing that Google is the visionary . Whilst this particular report is aimed at global providers of IaaS and excludes UKonly IaaS providers , it raises a very interesting question ; does the UK based provider of IaaS have a future ?
I believe the short answer is ‘ yes ’. However , the way Pulsant and other domestic providers of IaaS go to market is changing and in many respects has changed already . Microsoft has announced a UK data centre as has Amazon , so one of the mid-market ’ s chief differentiators until now around data sovereignty has overnight disappeared . No longer is the local IaaS provider able to claim that its cloud is located in the UK while the big players are offshore . Why wouldn ’ t everyone then just go to Microsoft and Amazon ?
Hybrid IT The premise of hybrid IT is that you , as the customer , can manage multiple workloads in multiple environments , whether physical or virtual . You may be consuming SaaS services so have no need of infrastructure , but your revenue generation application , your IP , sits inhouse on your own infrastructure . Your application continues to be developed by your people but using public cloud resources and many of your back office requirements are all based in a public cloud . This hybrid landscape is not uncommon and is becoming increasingly more complicated . Key to unlocking the power of hybrid IT is the use of multiple clouds which then raises the question of how to manage them .
Managed IaaS The global colocation providers offer cloud exchanges and the ability to connect to multiple clouds , which is great if you are large global enterprise with a significant IT team . In this scenario your network overlaps into the data centre and you have access to multiple cloud providers . Your extensive IT team is able to utilise the low latency connectivity and manage the different workloads in the different clouds .
For the UK mid-market who does not have an extensive IT team , this option isn ’ t feasible , which is why the domestic IaaS provider isn ’ t dead . The niche providers and the local providers will reinvent themselves as deliverers of managed IaaS . These
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