Organizations of all sizes are facing a growing sense of urgency to embrace cloud computing—to remain competitive, improve services, drive productivity and increase business agility. Business and IT leaders across all industries have seen significant upheaval driven by digital transformation, and that trend will only intensify in the years ahead.
IDC predicts that companies will commit to digital transformation “on a massive scale” over the next three to five years and that “Cloud First will be the new mantra for enterprise IT.”¹ Meanwhile, Gartner says by the end of the decade, a corporate “no cloud” policy will be as rare as a “no Internet” policy is today.²
For IT decision makers, the question is not whether to deploy cloud, but which cloud models make the most sense for their particular workloads and applications. Increasingly, IT teams are turning to the private cloud. Private cloud adoption is now at 77%, according to RightScale’s recent State of the Cloud Report,³ representing a sharp increase over the previous year. This growth is being driven by several factors, specifically:
- Private clouds enable organizations to achieve the economic and agility benefits of public clouds while maintaining the security, control and performance capabilities of on-premises data centers. Trust is a critical issue in cloud usage, and private clouds give IT teams much greater comfort levels in their ability to meet service-level agreements, improve data protection and ensure regulatory compliance.
- The price differential between private clouds and public clouds is narrowing. Technologies that have driven the growth of public cloud models and enabled public cloud providers to build hyperscale data centers are now being used to drive private cloud deployments. With technologies such as software-defined data centers and object storage, enterprises can access cloud benefits such as resource pooling, self-service provisioning and elastic scalability through their own data centers.
One of the other attractions is the ability to use a private-cloud-as-a-service model to accelerate and simplify deployments, avoiding the need to build, manage, deploy and modernize your infrastructure. For organizations building on-premises private clouds, the investment required to modernize the data center can be substantial—in not only capital expenses, but also finding personnel with cloud expertise.
By using a service model for private cloud, IT teams can eliminate the burden of undertaking a massive modernization and immediately deliver cloud benefits to their organizations. With the right private cloud service partner, organizations can:
- Get the private cloud up and running much faster, thereby increasing time to value and enhancing productivity for the IT team and end users.
- Access specific services to ensure security, data protection and compliance so the private cloud can be used for business-critical applications.
- Reduce costs and leverage a service-based pricing model that makes it simpler to manage IT budgets, with much greater accuracy in predicting and planning for costs.
The business case for using cloud models has never been stronger. Companies that fail to leverage the cloud run the risk of falling behind their competitors by missing out on next-generation economic advantages and agility. With a service-based model for private cloud, organizations can simplify their transition to the cloud without compromising security, control, data protection or compliance.
¹“IDC Predicts the Emergence of ‘The DX Economy’ in a Critical Period of Widespread Digital Transformation and Massive Scale Up of Third-Platform Technologies in Every Industry,” IDC, Nov. 4, 2015
²“Gartner Says by 2020 a Corporate ‘No Cloud’ Policy Will Be as Rare as a ‘No Internet’ Policy Is Today,” Gartner, June 22, 2016
³RightScale 2016 State of the Cloud Report, RightScale, Feb. 9, 2016
