FINAL WORD
MANAGEMENT LIKES
THE PAY-AS-YOU-GO
APPROACH, AND MORE
IMPORTANTLY, THEY
FIND THAT THESE
SCENARIOS ALLOW THE
BUSINESS TO WORK
FASTER AND GET TO
MARKET FASTER WITH
NEW AND IMPROVED
SOLUTIONS
W
hen talking to infrastructure
professionals, C-level
management and
development groups about using the
public cloud, the one thing that always
comes up is that each group has a
different vision of how to use the public
cloud, and it’s difficult to get their visions
aligned. Difficult, but possible.
Today, on-premises (or private cloud)
infrastructure is still the most-used
solution for production environments.
Slowly, we’re seeing the adoption of
hybrid environments (a combination of
private cloud and public cloud where the
public cloud is considered an extension of
your data centre) where certain front-end
workloads are moved to the public cloud.
Workloads like websites and new apps
are popular candidates for a move to the
cloud, but often the data itself stays on
premises in your private cloud.
The problem is that debates within the
business about using the public cloud
are often dominated by discussion of
production environments instead of
exploring opportunities where the cloud
could help save time, effort and money.
However, things are looking positive. The
public cloud services market in Middle
East and North Africa (MENA) region
is projected to grow 18.3% in 2016 to
total $879.3 million, up from $743.1
million in 2015, according a recent
report by Gartner.
Let’s have a look at some common use
cases where those benefits can be gained.
A test/ development/
acceptance environment
Every business needs an environment
for testing solutions, development and
acceptance. In an ideal world, these should
be three separate environments and they
should be the same as (or at least very
similar to) your production environment.
Unfortunately, the number of enterprises
that have the resources available to use
best practices is very limited. And those
few that have the technical resources
to do this often complain that there
aren’t enough other resources (people)
to maintain such environments and that
time is limited.
Why not use the public cloud for these
scenarios? Organisations can create
copies of the production environment (at
least the important parts of it) in a public
cloud and grant access to developers, test
engineers, workload owners and more
to that environment. After a project is
finished, that environment can simply be
shut down.
Developers, test engineers and quality
control teams love this approach
because it allows them to work on
production data (while not being on a
production environment) and perform
testing at scale.
Management likes the pay-as-you-go
approach, and more importantly, they
find that these scenarios allow the
business to work faster and get to market
faster with new and improved solutions.
GREGG PETERSEN
Regional Director, MEA and
SAARC, Veeam Software
84
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