Public or private cloud? Make it both

A lot of companies are debating today about a public cloud vs. private cloud IT strategy. Let’s face facts. The idea that you need to choose between public cloud or private cloud is dated. On the one side you have the public cloud ‘punk’ striving to adopt new innovation. In opposition there’s the private cloud ‘old guard’ of the IT department, the people who keep things ticking along and only get noticed when something goes wrong. One sees business opportunity and agility, the other sees risk.

The argument of public cloud or private cloud is a false dichotomy that creates unnecessary tension within an organisation, potentially depriving it of the business value to be gained from the cloud. This argument can have no victor because both sides are right.

The best approach to gaining business agility and minimising risk while leveraging existing IT assets comes from using a mix of both public and private cloud, or a hybrid cloud approach. According to Gartner, almost half of all large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017.

Core IT and Fast IT defined

Business agility has never been more important. The pressure to deliver new products quickly is growing. The days of big bang releases - comprised of a development cycle measured in months or even years, followed by a massive release - are long gone. Today’s cycles are much shorter – think days or weeks. Further, the explosion in mobile applications makes fast cycles mandatory. How can IT keep up when they can barely service existing apps? Addressing this challenge requires the right mix of Core IT and Fast IT.

Core ITsystems are the systems in your current datacentre and they need to play a major role. They encompass everything that you have on-premise - all of your legacy databases, source code and infrastructure. It would be crazy to throw all that away. It represents the intrinsic value of your business – as well as significant investment.

However, in order to achieve real business agility, you need Fast IT. Fast IT is the ability to accelerate innovation and speed time to market. It means instant access to necessary resources when you need them, eliminating delays in starting a new project and ultimately in delivering it. Fast IT is powered by cloud services that accelerate development and deployment.

Fast IT is all about responsiveness to competitive threats. It’s about surviving in a world of mobile apps, where updates occur frequently. Fast IT provides business agility because you’re no longer losing time, waiting for resources. It also brings a sense of immediacy that sometimes means failing fast, because the less time you waste before discovering something is not feasible, the better. Cloud-based apps and services can enable much faster development and deployment without compromising quality or security.

Core IT and Fast IT don’t need to clash, they are complimentary. In fact, the key to future success is to use Fast IT to extract more value from your Core IT.

Delivering apps faster and more efficiently

Developing and deploying applications into live systems in an online world is fraught with risk. In addition to all of the technologies already in use, now add cloud to the mix – as many companies are doing. Forget about a big bang approach to adopting the public cloud; that’s a fast track to disaster. There’s no need to completely rebuild an existing IT infrastructure in the cloud that’s already working on-premise. You’d be trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.

However, the cloud does offer certain advantages that you can gain incrementally, as business needs dictate. The biggest advantage is dramatically speeding up the software delivery process. Delay in getting to market means lost revenue or market share. To enable Fast IT, many companies are using the cloud to accelerate software delivery.

They may develop new functionality for an existing application or an entirely new application, using cloud resources but securely accessing on-premise Core IT assets, such as a database, via VPN. A hybrid approach supports the need for Fast IT - enabling the business agility organisations require, while still leveraging Core IT assets.

Fast IT offers developers access to the same types of tools they are already accustomed to using. It’s a familiar framework and infrastructure they’ll recognise from Core IT, but it’s available instantly, as a service. Instead of your IT department having to set up new environments, manage a source code repository, provide computing resources, stage the application once it is deemed ready and ultimately move the application to production, you can use the cloud for as much or as little of the process as you want.

Fast IT plugs into your existing Core IT and enables the rapid development cycles necessary. Instant provisioning and availability of cloud-based resources dramatically reduces delivery times and ensures that you deploy quality software.

Fast IT in the cloud also frees up Core IT staff to focus on improving the infrastructure. They have the time they need to ensure that Fast IT projects are built upon a solid foundation. This also eases the friction between IT teams and development teams by breaking the resource bottleneck at the start of each new project. It fosters a more collaborative environment, which is beneficial for all of the teams involved: development, IT and DevOps.

You don’t need to retrain your software engineers to achieve Fast IT. The hybrid approach doesn’t change the methods you’ll employ to produce value, it simply changes how you get there.

One enabler of Fast IT is Platform as a Service (PaaS). PaaS allows developers to achieve instant-on productivity. The “as a service” part of the equation cuts down the time between having an idea and implementing it. A continuous delivery pipeline made possible via public cloud services such as PaaS is an opportunity to achieve business agility and surpass competitors.

IaaS leads to PaaS

The adoption of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) was the wedge that opened the door for companies pursuing cloud strategies. It provided infrastructure scalability, reduced overhead and greater flexibility to respond to business needs. With the value established, growth in IaaS services has exploded.

However, a move to PaaS is the next logical step because IaaS simply doesn’t deliver some of the major advantages offered by the cloud. You still have ongoing infrastructure maintenance; you’re just doing it remotely instead of on-premise. PaaS abstracts away the infrastructure and ongoing maintenance, truly automating the application development and delivery process.

Looking ahead to 2017, IDC suggests a CAGR of 29.7 percent for PaaS, making it the fastest growing cloud services category. As Frank Gens, a chief analyst at IDC put it, “Over the next several years, the primary driver for cloud adoption will shift from economics to innovation as leading-edge companies invest in cloud services as the foundation for new competitive offerings.”

Using PaaS solutions, the need to leverage existing data and systems can be balanced with the pressure to be first to market and tighten the feedback loop from customers. In other words, the best of both Core IT and Fast IT.

Fast IT or Core IT?

The trick here is to start with requirements and leverage whichever one provides the greatest business value.

Before you can exploit the potential of Fast IT you have to assess where strategic advantage can be found. Fast IT and Core IT is not a one-size-fits-all solution. You need to define a set of requirements that enable you to push the right projects to Fast IT or Core IT – wherever the greatest business value can be realised.

Combining Core IT and Fast IT can break down the discontinuity that exists in the public vs. private cloud argument. There’s no need to make a decision to only support one or the other, you can decide what fits best on a case-by-case basis. Some projects will be better served as traditional Core IT endeavours while others will benefit from a Fast IT approach. Still others will be a mix of both.

The adoption of the cloud has acted as a stepping-stone enabling Fast IT and Core IT systems to work together. With automatic scalability, instant access to resources and the removal of infrastructure maintenance activities, forward-thinking companies can concentrate on innovation - such as ensuring that resources and talents are being funneled toward creating applications that customers receive value from.