you’re a senior IT executive that is under a lot of pressure, one of the questions you ask is how do you manage costs, but also how do you help your organization
become a digital enterprise. Unless you really drill
down and look at what proportion of your application
portfolio requires on-premise solutions and what
proportion can be done in a different fashion, you just
can’t accept the face value you get back.
JE: I think that is what companies are doing when
they’re evaluating private cloud. They’re looking at
what they have today and what proportion could go
to public cloud. People are making public cloud the
default for certain applications if it is customer facing
or a mobile application. But at the same time, there is
a lot of gravity around those existing applications
that have run the business for a long time. As good as
cloud is, and as good as a lot of the cloud providers
and vendors are, there aren’t always perfect applications that can replace everything in your environment in the public cloud. There are a lot of things that
companies continue to run on a mainframe or on
some legacy platform that sits side by side with other
applications in their environment. Those things are
very difficult, if not impossible, to pick up and move
to a public cloud.
Private cloud checks off a lot of the other boxes that
organizations are looking for--in the form of automation and agile infrastructure, potentially lower costs
and geographic requirements--because it is in their
own data center. it is not just one of these things that
pushes people to private cloud, it is the fact that it hits
a lot of these things, and for certain core applications
it is just the easiest route. The path of least resistance
is sometimes the right path for companies.
DL: What is the cost and agility argument for private clouds? Why move from a legacy environment
where you own the hardware and software, to
another environment where you still own the hardware and software? What would be the internal
argument to move into private clouds?
BG: To be honest, I think that is a big challenge. An
investment is required to move from standard issue
virtualization where system administration is doing
manual tasks, to providing cloud capabilities. There
isn’t a magic button on the side of the server that you
can press to make it cloud capable. It requires software
86 | THE DOPPLER | FALL 2016
infrastructure, hardware infrastructure and you will
certainly have to train up people’s operational skills.
You need to make a strong financial assessment. Ask
yourself, will I get enough value out of that investment
and create capabilities beyond what I already have in
place? That seems like an ongoing challenge.
JE: One of Rackspace’s strong suits is the support
that we provide for our customers. Lack of expertise
is often the number one reason for not moving to
cloud at this stage. Rackspace has actually built a
model for delivering private cloud that we believe
gives users a lot of the benefits of the private cloud,
but with the turnkey nature of public cloud. We bring
all the expertise you need, we do the automated
upgrades and updates to the private cloud software.
We make it as painless as possible for a company to
deploy, and we can even bring in hardware, if a customer wants the hardware. They don’t even have to
own it, they can rent it from Rackspace, whether it is
in our data center or theirs.
I think there are models with OpenStack or private
clouds in general, where agility comes from the fact
that users look at that private cloud just like they
would a public cloud. They see an endpoint on an API;
they see the automation tools they’re using today-like Chef, Ansible, Salt and all the tools that they’re
comfortable with--working equally well on public or
private cloud. Again, the only difference is that it
physically sits in your data center and it makes the life
of certain people in the IT organization a whole lot
easier, because they don’t have to make the case that
everything has to change within the environment.
Only certain things have to change, and that is just
easier to swallow.
Whether or not you believe public cloud is the long
term future, which I agree that long-long-long term it
may be--10,15 or 20 years--certainly public cloud has
a bigger and bigger role over time, but that doesn’t
mean private cloud isn’t a very big and growing business. The folks at ITC say that private cloud is growing at a rate of 35%, reaching ~$40 billion by 2019. it
is a very vibrant growing business and it just proves
that there is a demand for it.
DL: Where do you see the future of cloud going, and
how quickly do you see it moving from private to
public?