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3 minute read
Companies want to take advantage of any perceived method of becoming more productive and gaining a competitive edge over their rivals. These days there’s the tendency to move workloads off the public cloud because of cost, security, availability.
Cloud computing has become popular with large and small businesses in many market sectors. Migrating part of a computing environment to public cloud service providers is an attractive route that offers multiple potential benefits for participating companies. It offers agility and efficiency, allowing for more time to focus on your core business; and it relieves the burden of having to manage your IT infrastructure.
While most organizations still host their applications and data in a cloud environment, there is a growing trend to move back to offline solutions due to cost, performance, and security considerations. There are two different views of the same concept: there are those who claim that in order to gain all the benefit from the public cloud, it must be fully embraced and exploited, without fear of lock-in. For example, building an application in a cloud native manner, running natively on the public cloud and fully integrating their application with a cloud provider’s higher level cloud services.
On the other side of the coin, are those who want more flexibility with public cloud adoption. They fear cost growing out of control and vendor lock-in. The fear having to live with the impossibility to negotiate best price status from a cloud provider who is deeply aware that their applications have a deep dependency on their higher-level PaaS offerings.
Many companies are approaching a “Cloud Exit Strategy” or toward an “Hybrid Cloud strategy”. Reverse cloud migration, also known as cloud repatriation, involves moving your applications back to an infrastructure-based system or to a private cloud.
Typically, organizations transfer part or all of their business components from a public cloud to a local data center, which is more secure and offers greater control and accessibility over the computing environment. Companies have their data in a mix of locations fragmented. Some offer private cloud infrastructure, some public, and some facilitate the connection in between.
Instead by hybrid cloud we mean a cloud computing environment that uses some mix of online/offline, private/public, third-party cloud services (like the use of technologies like Kubernetes or Docker).
The main points which drive a company to make such a shift are security, costs and availability.
Costs
Suppose you are a company and you decide to cut off some expenses. You do some consideration and realize that Public Cloud promised better cost-effectiveness for businesses who were dealing with a huge amount of data for backup and archiving. For companies that are just starting out and can’t afford the up-front expenses of servers, storage, and other physical IT infrastructure, public cloud computing offers a simple and quick solution that won’t break their budget. On the other hand, running applications that aren’t architected for the public cloud can also lead to increased bandwidth consumption, resulting in higher fees.
Security
According to many surveys, security is the leading reason for the shift toward the hybrid cloud. Companies came back from the primitive idea that data in the public cloud was fully protected and secure, just like gold bars in a bank. This happened since several high-profile data leaks involving cloud providers occurred.
The weakness of public cloud services is that the very nature of public cloud infrastructure allows data to be accessed from anywhere, and data often has to travel exposed to the open internet, making it vulnerable to theft or infection by malware. Moreover, sharing the same environment in a public cloud increases the likelihood of the wrong people being granted access to the wrong data which are supposed to be secure data. The Private Cloud on the other hand allows companies to implement the security protocols they want to secure their data.
Availability and Control
Public cloud providers regularly present the benefits of being able to access data from anywhere at any time. It’s true that access doesn’t make any sense if the provider is experiencing system downtime. By shifting to a private cloud environment, companies can secure much higher levels of uptime service. Finally, businesses make sure their data and assets will be available when they need them most and share them with the team.
In conclusion, the ideal solution is a hybrid cloud deployment which gives organizations the choice to place their applications and data where they fit best, which combines the security and control of a private cloud with the scalability and resources of a public cloud. It means businesses can keep their existing workloads running in public clouds, but without the compliance and high costs that can arise from having to host workloads on public cloud infrastructure.
