Clouds Are a Key Enabler for Digital Transformation
Clouds fundamentally change who has control over IT. Traditional infrastructures rely on IT teams to provision resources, workloads, applications and services. Clouds don’t – they let the individuals responsible for doing something useful with IT be the ones to provision that IT.
At the risk of buzzword overload, clouds are not only useful as part of the perpetual quest for business agility, they are a key enabler for digital transformation. In other words, they let people get things done more quickly than traditional IT. In turn, this allows those individuals to focus their efforts on automation.
The traditional discussion about refocusing staff efforts due to cloud is that clouds allow IT teams to stop worrying about keeping the infrastructure running, freeing them to do other things. And this is only part of the cloud story. Once others within the organization have figured out how this cloud things works, they too should have some of their day freed up.
With clouds, time is no longer spent chasing IT to provision things. When both non-IT staff and IT staff have some extra time on their hands, the technical knowledge of the IT staff can be put to good use by automating the mundane parts of the rest of the business. This not only frees up even more time, it can replace error-prone manual processes with IT automation that gets it right every time. This is “digital transformation.”
Cloud Choices
When it comes to on-premises cloud architectures, you may choose to build a DIY cloud or perhaps purchase a cloud platform that provides a much more turnkey experience and the roll-your-own option.
Choosing a DIY approach to cloud is asking IT teams to learn how to drive a car at the same time they’re learning to build it from scratch. This request comes while still the IT teams are still driving the old car and having to teach the passengers how all the accessories work.
On the other hand, cloud platforms provide everything necessary to start using a cloud minutes after powering the hardware on. Cloud platform vendors test the hardware and software as a whole. Everything is tested to work together, both at time of initial deployment, and with every subsequent update. Software updates and hardware capacity expansions are tested, supported, and shipped by the vendor as a unit, and software updates are implemented using rolling updates, so that there’s no downtime required.
Thanks to the extensive testing, adding and retiring hardware is a seamless process with cloud platforms. In short, these platforms remove the need for IT teams to worry about IT infrastructure.
Cloudistics continues this conversation about DIY private cloud versus cloud platforms on their Private Cloud blog and we recommend you pop over there to get the full story!
Making Complex IT Simple
In modern cloud infrastructure, ease of use and scalability is really important. What if there was an on-premise solution that achieved simplicity and scalability of modern cloud infrastructure without a great deal of underlying complexity and scalability limitations?
Beyond the aforementioned Cloudistics blog post, we also want to highlight a Discovery Series interview segment that ActualTech Media CEO Scott D. Lowe recorded with Cloudistics Chief Scientist Jai Menon. In this interview, the conversation around the turnkey nature of a cloud platform continues with conversations around:
- How software-defined elements come together to take complexity and turn it into simplicity.
- How to run apps without knowing too much about infrastructure.
- How Cloudistics becomes the caretaker of infrastructure for customers.
- What the Cloudistics stack looks like and how it is comparable to Amazon stack: storage, compute, networking, all of the cloud experience, and much more.
