Everything-as-a-Service is where cloud services seem to be going and one of the main drivers of this is the emerging hybrid cloud. But, Andrew Cruise, managing director, Routed, a neutral cloud provider, says that true hybrid cloud solutions have not yet been implemented in South Africa. He says this, after launching Routed, which is focused on building and developing secure, reliable and robust cloud platforms.
Offering multiple integration technologies, we enable low touch, low disruption server migration between customer premise and the cloud. This unique approach is in line with the most recent understanding of true hybrid cloud where the primary, on-premises data centres are enhanced with a growing combination of public cloud services such as software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS),” says Cruise.
He says the migration to hybrid cloud has been fuelled by the massive leaps taken with brands such as Amazon and Microsoft: “We have seen both these companies launching cloud-native products and services across the majority of their regions. With this approach, they are also embracing more diverse infrastructure providers, which is why services and solutions such as Routed’s are critical to the overall success of a cloud strategy.”
Gartner predicts the worldwide public cloud services market will grow 18% in 2017 to $246.8B. While Forbes says that cloud platforms are enabling new, complex business models and orchestrating more globally-based integration networks in 2017. Combined with cloud services adoption increasing in the mid-tier and small & medium businesses (SMB), leading researchers including Forrester are adjusting their forecasts upward according to Forbes.
Cruise says that a hybrid cloud approach makes sense: “If interactions with a private cloud are the same as with a public cloud, by stitching the two together you achieve a consistent user experience with portability across single tenant (private) and multi-tenant (public) infrastructure. The enterprise can choose on-demand, which workloads are acceptable to host in the public cloud and which are restricted to dedicated infrastructure. This can then address adequately compliance, regulatory, security or performance issues.”
He says that this similarly does not yet exist in South Africa, despite several service providers laying claim to these types of solutions because of the global hype around cloud and hybrid solutions: “It is important to note that just because you privately connect a hosting environment to an on premise server room, does not make it hybrid cloud.”
The opportunity is there according to Cruise. The lure into cloud is too strong to ignore for companies not yet there, and for those who have already got larger data centre investments, hybrid is possibly the route to follow.
“Future of Everything’ says that in 10 to 15 years’ cloud will simply be known as computing. The trick to getting there, according to Cruise, is to ensure that from the start your strategy is sound and you have approached the infrastructure component in a way that would eventually make it a commodity and not a barrier to entry.
