Digital Operations: Cloud Computing
In this third edition of the Digital Operations weekly blog series, we’ll be focusing on cloud computing for our topic for the week.
We’ll keep this discussion – on cloud computing – high level for now and do more of a deep dive into specific choices or combinations of choices that may make sense for your organization.
We’ll also go into some of the industry trends and current topics in following weeks.
Choices Galore
Over the last 15 years, there has been a transformational change in how computing is done within the enterprise.
AWS started a revolution in 2006 by introducing its cloud computing services, completely disrupting the entrenched on-premise data center model.
Shortly thereafter, major players like Microsoft, Google, and IBM saw the enormous potential of this new market and brought cloud offerings of their own to the market.
Today, enterprises have a wide selection of cloud service providers to choose from.
There are the major players like AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and IBM, but also a plethora of other cloud computing companies that provide excellent services for their enterprise customers.
Pick Your Provider(s)
Early on, competition between the major cloud providers was intense, each vying to provide the best tools and services to gain customers within this emerging and highly lucrative market.
As such, each cloud provider began offering some unique features that differentiated its offering from the others.
Enterprises began taking advantage of these differences by running their unique workloads on different cloud providers, however it was quickly realized that managing workloads on multiple clouds was complex and difficult.
The introduction of containers and then Kubernetes allowed for the simplification of managing workloads across multiple clouds, and many of the major cloud providers have embraced this concept and built it into their service management offerings.
As a result, many enterprises are running their workloads across multiple cloud providers, taking advantage of the financial and performance benefits offered by each specific provider.
Is Cloud Always the Right Choice?
Despite all the hype of moving “everything” to the cloud, enterprises have realized that some workloads don’t run well in a cloud environment.
This has been true in many sectors like manufacturing, for example, as well as those with unique security and privacy requirements, but this has recently expanded into other workloads.
The introduction of smart IoT devices that gather vast amounts of data with the need to process this data in real-time have driven many workloads away from the cloud.
Edge computing is on the rise and will be as important in an enterprise’s digital architecture designs and decisions as cloud computing has been in the past.
Bottom Line
Enterprises have a wealth of options when it comes to selecting where to run their workloads, whether running in a public cloud, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, edge computing, or some combination of all of the above.
The most important decision for enterprises today is not whether to run some workloads in the cloud, but rather how to efficiently manage and optimize these workloads, wherever they’re running.
This blog is a part of the Digital Operations blog series by Aragon Research’s Sr. Director of Research, Craig Kennedy.
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