Peter Clarke, MD, LanDynamix responds to the Editor’s question as follows:
The response is part of what I have always said in that cloud is not for everyone.
I don’t know if I would agree with the Nutanix numbers, but I have been saying for a while that the early adopters are not seeing all the milk and honey that was promised via lifting everything to the cloud.
When they refer to on-premise data centre, they really mean clients hosting at their own office, it’s a traditional server room at the clients’ offices. Nutanix is a solution that allows customers to use their own equipment and get “cloud-like” services, but they own the kit and are in control.
The variable cost with public cloud is quite possibly the biggest issue, nobody can give a fixed cost as usage and load make the end bill vary. My opinion is that certain workloads are suited to the cloud and the cloud providers are in the best position to run and maintain that infrastructure.
Office 365 is a great example here. Here’s one possible scenario: We could build our own Exchange and SharePoint servers and manage them; therefore, when something goes wrong it would be up to us to sort it out. Office 365 mail is built on Exchange and it includes SharePoint, Microsoft are the guys who developed that software,
Line of business and legacy applications that are bespoke to an organisation, do not benefit from the knowledge that a vendor has with Office 365. In an instance of moving our line of business ERP system to Microsoft Azure, Microsoft cannot add the same kind of value. They will give me some cloud processing space to run my app on but when it goes wrong I am on my own to fix it, and because I don’t have access to the behind the scene layers of Azure troubleshooting is a lot more difficult for me. The costs of putting that app in the cloud to me does not make sense. I can buy hardware from Dell that has the best SLA and support and I have visibility into all of the layers which enhances my ability to resolve issues.
That said, I don’t think moving everyone back to the clients’ on-premises is answer due to our power situation. The data centres are geared to run on generators for days at a time if necessary, not all businesses can afford that which is one significant consideration for not bringing everything back to your own data centre.
What I see happening is clients provisioning their own private cloud in data centres - they get the benefit of being in control of their own systems and having the uptime that these data centres offer. Customers will purchase their own hardware and co-locate this in a data centre.
Our own environment is like the above. We use Office 365 for all the messaging and collaboration tools; we let Microsoft run that and get on with it. Our ERP system plus systems management tools that we want more control over are hosted on our own equipment within the Hetzner and Teraco data centres. Last week when our generator failed, we were still able to work by sending people home and running over 3G, we got the benefits of cloud but not at the high cost if we run everything in Azure.