Cloud computing is now pretty much everywhere — including in smaller enterprises, some 37% of which have already adopted cloud computing . This year U.S. small and midsized businesses are expected to boost what they spend on cloud computing by 28% .
Still, in 2015 cloud computing remains a work in progress, and at Quest we get lots of questions from customers about how to cloud.
Private vs. public vs. hybrid
Should we configure our on-premise datacenter into a private cloud?
It’s certainly tempting: You’ll have an IT environment customized to your business that you control and keep secure.
But you’ll also bear the capital costs of infrastructure, the hassles of upgrading and maintenance, and the challenges of keeping up with ever-changing technologies and security hacks (think mobile, Internet-of-Everything).
Should we give up our datacenter for a public cloud?
Also tempting, since you’ll deploy what you want almost instantly while increasing/decreasing services on demand as business dictates, save capital costs by hitting up your OpEx budget to pay only for what you use, and hand off much IT maintenance.
But how secure are public clouds? How reliable? Do you dare migrate your entire IT infrastructure off-site and out of your hands? (Note that while you’re thinking about this, some of your line-of-business execs have probably implemented public clouds behind your back.)
Should we opt for a hybrid cloud?
A hybrid cloud enables you to quickly expand your IT capabilities via public clouds while keeping your private cloud.
But until recently, hybrid clouds still imposed limits on how much control you have over cross-cloud workload portability, security, and achieving compliance.
A new kind of hybrid cloud
At Quest, we’ve recognized several hybrid cloud deployment challenges:
- Insecure connections and limited workload protection
- Vendor lock-in due to narrow cloud solution choices
- Siloed infrastructure caused by proprietary cloud architectures, fragmented networking and security solutions, and incompatible management tools
- Deployments made complex and slow by need for application reconfiguration, manual discovery of infrastructure dependencies, and lack of visibility or control
Fortunately, we’ve found a set of breakthrough solutions that address these challenges: Cisco’s Intercloud Fabric (ICF).
Using Cisco ICF, we can deploy an open, highly-secure hybrid cloud that functions as a single unified environment so you maintain control while your datacenter’s boundaries extend to the public clouds of your choice.
Cisco ICF processes perform independent of hardware, network, and hypervisor. Your apps and workloads power up where you want them and all is transparently managed from a single pane of glass. So you can consistently enforce your network and security policies across all data and applications wherever they reside.
It’s a heterogeneous hybrid infrastructure that’s end-to-end secure as it provides workload mobility across the clouds of your choice — any hypervisor to any provider, no vendor lock-in.
Cisco ICF will be available in Q4 2015 as part of Quest’s cloud services portfolio, empowering you to get the most out of hybrid cloud that fits your unique business demands.
