TES | Old is New – Cloud’s Weaknesses are Being Exposed

Did COVID and the demand of remote working create a cost challenge you need to overcome?

Old is New – Did COVID Expose the Cloud Cost Model?

by Rob Davis | 5 min Read

The King, the Chessboard and the Cloud

You’ve probably heard the fable of the king and the chessboard. When chess was invented, it’s said the king was so impressed, he offered the inventor any reward he desired. The inventor simply asked for a grain of rice to be placed on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third and so on until the chessboard was full. You can guess the rest; the inventor cornered the rice market, the country ran out of rice, the king had the inventor executed because no-one likes a smartass, and so on. It’s a great illustration of how exponential growth works; I think it also teaches us an important lesson for Cloud strategy and how innovative use of ‘old’ tech enables an optimised hybrid Cloud approach.

Exponential growth versus practical friction

Anyone dealing with Cloud spend might sympathise with the king’s rice budget challenge. Organizations surveyed in the Flexera 2020 Cloud report said that they average 23% over budget on Cloud spend, and expect increases of 47% over the next 12 months. The Cloud promise of always-on, never break, and the scaling and cost savings from pushing apps into the Cloud can transform into unexpected costs and commitments. A Forbes article makes an interesting connection between the chess story and the trajectory of movements like Cloud. It points out that in most versions of the story, the inventor is never paid because there’s not enough rice in the land. In other words, theoretical exponential growth tends to hit real-world limits. We see this in technology. For example, Moore’s Law shows signs of coming up against some laws of physics, albeit they may be a blip as optical and quantum computing kick in. The Cloud curve may seem far from hitting this kind of friction. The 2020 IDG Cloud Computing Survey reports accelerating Cloud adoption in the last two years, with 81% of respondents reporting already using Cloud compared to 73% in 2018. Yet there are counter-indicators; performance and uptime shortfalls, networking latency and equipment upgrade costs, security and compliance issues, increased complexity, and some legacy and high-volume apps not playing happily in the Cloud. With the economic uncertainties of the post-Covid business environment, there’s plenty of food for thought around Cloud strategy.

Where next – Old is New?

It’s worth weighing Cloud benefits against the drawbacks, considering options and shaping strategy to fit. In considering options, it’s important to be aware of our legacy blind-spot; the unconscious assumption that any ‘old’ technology must be obsolete. Superseded technology doesn’t necessarily wither and die – often it evolves to address the shortcomings that led to it being superseded. On-prem mainframe risks slipping into the blind-spot despite remaining mainstream. The IDG survey found 54% of organisations’ IT environments are still mostly on-prem. Mainframe is sometimes seen as the high fixed-cost, inflexible, proprietary dinosaur which Cloud left behind when it can be an essential cornerstone of an optimised hybrid Cloud environment.

What’s on offer?

Mainframe technology offers Linux-based, highly secure, flexible, scalable, cost-effective compute and storage capability. I’ve seen organizations with as little as 150TB save 30% off their Cloud storage with a few simple tricks involving shifting to on-prem storage, keeping all the flexibility of Cloud at a much lower cost. With zero trust computing likely to become a necessity for organisations handling large volume sensitive data, IBM’s Hyper Protect Services offer the required centralised control of hyper-secure data and applications. On-prem mainframe offers answers to big-ticket Cloud concerns by complementing and seamlessly interacting with the Cloud environment.

What next?

It’s not sensible to retreat to the shelter of on-prem just because Cloud is looking a bit less white and fluffy. Cloud is too well-established and delivers too many benefits. However, I am seeing a movement towards a hybrid model, mainly from early adopters of Cloud, decoupling their IT strategy into a hybrid approach focused on flexibility. This enables enterprises to cherry-pick infrastructure by workload as needs change, gaining the strengths of Cloud with a cost structure that does not hinder innovation, value or speed. According to the 2020 IDG report, 12% say they have moved an application or workload out of the Cloud, and 15% plan to do so in the next 12 months. This is hardly a Cloud backlash, just a prudent adjustment towards a pragmatic, flexible, best-cost deployment model. Whether and how you undertake this adjustment depends on many factors. The first step is an open-minded assessment of where you stand, taking account of any ‘old’ technology blind-spot. TES offers a free assessment to get you started. If you’re interested, get in touch and let’s continue the conversation.

Cloud Conundrum for Storage

A Fresh Look at the Cloud Conundrum for Storage

by David Reynolds | 5 min Read

If you Google ‘cloud conundrum’ you get lots of hits on the traditional fluffy kind of clouds and how they affect climate change, but also quite a few on the technology kind, and people’s nagging doubts around AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and the rest. They reinforce the thought that if cloud really is the future, it’s not going to be a completely untroubled one. Cost and security issues crop up a lot, and point back to what I believe is the basic cloud conundrum; that cloud delivers greater control with one hand while taking it away with the other. Cloud offers enterprises greater control over storage and compute capacity by freeing them from the constraints of inflexible IT capacity and fixed hardware and staff costs. It does this at the cost of taking away their direct control over cost per terabyte, cyber security and resilience. There are solutions available now which go a long way to resolve this cloud conundrum, putting control back with the enterprise without losing the flexibility of hybrid cloud. Stepping back from the cloud hype to take a fresh, objective look at these solutions as they relate to your IT landscape can be the first step in getting that control back, cutting costs and increasing cyber resilience.

The cloud cost challenge

The promise of cloud storage lies in the economies of scale of vast Storage Area Network estates being able to offer the flexibility and capacity to meet the full range of enterprise data needs at lowest cost. In reality, this promise isn’t always met. Spinning up massive short-term capacity for one-off data mining exercises is one thing, delivering complex business data needs over a sustained period is another. The long-term business case for putting everything in the cloud doesn’t necessarily stack up, particularly for enterprises with significant sunk costs in existing datacentre capacity, or those with specific and complex data security needs driven by regulatory requirements and data sensitivity. Data like this on escalating AWS costs casts some doubt on the cost benefits of cloud even in the shorter term. Cloud can remove the headache of managing storage as a fixed, inflexible capital cost. In doing so, it creates new challenges in the longer term as you lose direct control over those costs and, to an extent, management of the data itself.

The cloud cyber challenge

Enterprises are having to adapt to an ever-shifting cyber landscape, not only from the proliferation of ever more sophisticated cyberattacks, but from the evolving regulatory requirements they have to meet to protect their customers and sensitive data. Because cloud providers have to cater to a wide range of enterprises with different data security profiles, the extra level of security required for highly sensitive data tends to be offered as additional, chargeable layers of service, rather than it being designed in from the ground up. Flexing data security controls to meet complex and fluid enterprise data security needs can be a challenge in the necessarily generic cloud environment.

Time for a fresh approach?

The answer to these challenges is not to run away from cloud as a storage solution, nor is it to engage ostrich mode, carry on believing all the hype, and plough on with cloud regardless. As we hopefully emerge from the worst of the Covid pandemic, into a time when cost and cybersecurity will be more critical than ever, it’s worth reappraising storage strategy in relation to the unique IT landscape, security posture and needs of the business, rather than from the viewpoint of ‘Cloud’s the answer, now what’s the question?’ In doing so, it’s important to consider the wider technology picture. If you’ve been heavily invested in virtualised, Intel-based, hybrid or full cloud architecture for a while, it’s easy to slip into the assumption that other technologies haven’t advanced much since some enterprises started moving away from mainframe towards server farms, AWS and the rest. Actually, mainframe technology can now often offer lower-cost storage solutions than cloud, with greater security and control, plus all the flexibility of a Linux hybrid-cloud environment.

An alternative to the cloud conundrum

IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud offers storage costs at least a third lower than pure AWS block storage (EBS) , with at least one enterprise achieving 2-3 times lower costs It can deliver clean and easy movement of data between on-prem, AWS block and object storage under one management console. It provides a single unified solution for migrating data to cloud across multiple technology platforms – Dell, IBM, HPE – avoiding the need to manage their different cloud migration methodologies. Data can be encrypted and moved to an air-gapped S3 instance from a single central point of control. Whether it can solve the cloud conundrum for your enterprise storage needs depends on your enterprise. If you want to find out, contact us for a free online assessment here.

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Author: Louise Richardson