Organizations often think of public cloud as a way to reduce cost, gain elasticity or convert from Capex to Opex. But the cloud is about business. It’s about enabling business through innovation across different cloud models.
Thinking that only the public cloud platform can solve all your business technology challenges is like trying to use one color to paint a masterpiece. These days, public cloud is typically just one aspect—albeit an important aspect—of a broader multicloud strategy.
According to Rackspace Technology’s Future of Compute survey, organizations are running applications on a relatively even split between public cloud (35%), private cloud (33%) and data centers or colocation facilities (30%).1 The study found 43% of key applications run on private cloud, including e-commerce systems, back-office automation and more.
This data is consistent with other industry studies that show organizations are using a mix of multiple clouds and data center services—and plan to do so for the foreseeable future. Why? Because there are still significant business benefits to each model and in leveraging current IT investments.
Early adopters of cloud have painfully proved that not every workload benefits from being in a public cloud. In a data-obsessed world, it’s the data and application needs that drive the infrastructure decision. And, as cloud moves from early adopters to mainstream, organizations are looking to take advantage of an always-on economy regardless of where applications and data reside.
Today’s reality is that the lines are quickly blurring between the data center, public and private cloud, and the edge. This convergence of platforms is partially driven by innovation from vendors like VMware, Dell Technologies, Intel and others, as well as alliances to ensure cross-platform compatibility among once staunch competitors.
This new reality gives organizations more flexibility than ever to choose the right model for each workload and application. Cloud architects, IT teams and business leaders can make decisions based on the outcomes their organization is looking to achieve—focused on business differentiators. The shift to a discussion about business outcomes is why many cloud conversations about what is possible with each model need to change.
Elevating the Value of a Modern Private Cloud
If you haven’t evaluated your cloud options recently, you’re probably in for a big surprise. Typically, you may think about private cloud as a legacy technology you leverage for benefits such as control, security, performance and dependability. But today’s modern private cloud is a key enabler of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments.
A modern private cloud environment is one that:
- Delivers key attributes of public and private cloud.
- Supports traditional and cloud-native applications, virtual machines and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, containers and blockchain.
- Is built on a consistent foundation across a distributed environment.
- Can support cloud-native containerized development with a near-serverless developer experience.
Without a consistent architecture, it takes a significant investment to rewrite an application for another environment without driving true value and innovation. As such, organizations need to avoid the creation of infrastructure silos and take an approach that ensures consistent infrastructure and operations, regardless of the platform.
There are a number of key technologies that contribute to the next-generation model of private clouds and give cloud decision-makers more flexibility in how they coordinate and manage their multicloud environments.
Critical foundational technologies include VMware Cloud, which provides a consistent platform from the data center to the cloud to the edge, and Dell Technologies infrastructure built on 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Processors, which enable organizations to optimize performance based on the needs of each application and workload.
For more information on what private cloud can do for you, please download the white paper: “Changing the Cloud Conversation: Elevating the Value of Private Cloud Through Innovative Technologies”
Leveraging the Value of VMware Cloud With Managed Services
Although there are many similarities between cloud models today, moving data and managing applications in the cloud is not the same as in your data center or even among different cloud vendors. Cloud adoption is a transformative process and requires new ways of thinking about architecture, new engineering skills, new approaches to operations and security, and sometimes new tools.
That is where VMware and Rackspace Technology are changing the conversation. The two companies have a deep relationship and have developed innovative solutions in close collaboration.
This close collaboration has allowed Rackspace Technology to develop one of the industry’s most extensive portfolios of managed services built on or for VMware Cloud environments. Organizations are benefiting from consistency in how clouds are architected and managed and the processes used, as well as Rackspace Technology’s deep VMware expertise.
Organizations also highly value VMware Cloud’s consistency across cloud environments that can run on or off premises and across hyperscalers, how emerging technologies are delivered across clouds and the ability to leverage the same tools to manage multicloud environments.
Elevating the Value of Private Cloud Through Innovative Technologies
Read this paper to learn how to applying innovative new technologies to private cloud environments, can enhance the benefits of private cloud while also being able to access leading-edge applications.
Download NowBecause of the innovations VMware has enabled and the close development relationship, Rackspace Technology VMware-based environments make it possible to run a software-defined data center on top of single or multi-tenant infrastructure to create a complete public-, private- or hybrid-cloud-like experience anywhere. You can have:
- Flexible infrastructure.
- Self-service.
- Consumption-based pricing and rapid deployments.
- Advanced automation with elastic scalability and simplified management.
- Containerized DevOps experience.
- Artificial intelligence and machine learning deployments.
- Private cloud advantages with end-to-end security and regulatory compliance.
- Ability to leverage your investment in VMware tools and knowledge while progressively transforming to the cloud as your business demands.
A jointly developed Center of Excellence can help organizations with services such as migrations, as well as deliver agile support and engineering with deep VMware expertise through Rackspace Elastic Engineering for VMware.
See related article: “The Cloud Expertise Shortage Is Real: This New Services Model Helps You Overcome It”
Taking the Next Step
The debate between private cloud and public cloud is over. You win. You don’t have to choose one model over the other; you can choose the model that best meets the needs of your applications and workloads. For more information on how you can change the cloud conversation in your organization, please visit Rackspace Technology. (Please provide hyperlink to use).
1 “Building vs. Buying Applications ─ Key Insights,” Rackspace Technology, Nov. 18, 2020
