EDITOR’S QUESTION
IAN JANSEN VAN RENSBURG,
SENIOR MANAGER, TECHNICAL
PRESALES, VMWARE SUB-
SAHARAN AFRICA
T
he business question today
crossing the mind of many a
CIO is: Does it matter where an
application exists – in either a public or
private cloud? As long as it works, right?
Surely the platform you use becomes
irrelevant, and the scope of what you
can deploy depends more specifically on
the type of business you are in, as well
as the legacy systems that the business
relies on.
To that end, those enterprises that were
born in the public cloud are not likely
to invest in private cloud software.
Moreover, many larger enterprises,
although acutely aware that the cloud
is the infrastructure of the future,
are still not entirely convinced that
investing in a one-size-fits-all cloud
suite is the way to go.
Conversely, if an enterprise decided to
completely rely on the public cloud for
their business, they then automatically
rely on the very same infrastructure for
security, data protection and stability, as
the source is the same.
In a perfect world, companies should
have the choice to run specific
applications on public or private
clouds (depending on the use case),
without putting their eggs all in one
basket. If you turn the spotlight to
legislation around the location of data,
bandwidth concerns and security and
control, it becomes apparent that some
applications will still need to run in a
private data centre.
This then builds the business case for
changing the private data centre into a
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“In a perfect world,
companies should
have the choice
to run specific
applications on
public or private
clouds (depending
on the use case),
without putting
their eggs all in
one basket.”
private cloud environment. This private
cloud can then be extended to, and
between a public cloud (as and when
needed), in a hybrid cloud scenario with
workload mobility between the two. The
reality is that to achieve this, investment
in a software suite will need to be made.
Deploying a robust cloud software suite
will allow a business to get to market up
to 6–8x faster, as a result of eliminating
complex processes around system design,
testing, spinning-up and configuration.
Furthermore, we have seen that when
deployed properly, a cloud suite can
help increase admin productivity by
double and completely automate
onerous tasks such as patching,
updates and monitoring and they can
help reduce overall TCO of private
cloud deployments by up to 30–40%,
while at the same time eliminating
hardware costs.
But all of this requires operational
changes and an overall different way of
thinking about IT as well as the services
it provides to users and customers.
This is the clincher and this is the true
business case for private cloud software,
as you can build a cloud management
platform for full self-service capabilities.
A cloud suite should not be cumbersome
or complex. It must facilitate a business
path to a hybrid cloud, it must help map
your journey to IoT, and it must, with
ease, link private and public clouds in a
single public cloud provider environment
that can be deployed quickly and
managed centrally. n
“Deploying a robust
cloud software
suite will allow a
business to get to
market up to 6–8x
faster, as a result
of eliminating
complex processes
around system
design, testing,
spinning-up and
configuration.”
INTELLIGENTCIO
77