Delivering the future potential of hyperscale cloud

Source – thestack.com

Hyperscale, most closely associated with big data and cloud, is the provisioning required in distributed computing environments to efficiently scale from a few servers to thousands of servers in an instant: the public cloud.

Hyperscale cloud is the management, from migration to on-going support, of client business applications hosted in the public cloud. This includes the maintenance, support and security for business applications hosted in AWS and Microsoft Azure.

Gartner has suggested that by 2020, over 80% of businesses will have at least some applications hosted in the public cloud. Businesses are moving away from on-premise solutions in favour of more scalable and agile cloud environments – moving the applications that they can from legacy systems.

There is a market perception that in-house maintenance of on-premise solutions can be expensive so MSPs with the expertise to manage these for clients, coupled with the hyperscale cloud integration know-how are in greater demand.

Drivers for public cloud

Cost-efficiency, agility and scalability are the key drivers for hyperscale cloud adoption. For enterprise organisations, the biggest benefit of hyperscale cloud is the ability to scale up and down according to demand. For example, in an e-commerce environment, a business can increase IT capability during busy online shopping periods such as black Friday and the Christmas season.

By utilising the public cloud, whether AWS or Microsoft Azure or another public cloud provider, the business can provision thousands of servers for this period instantly and then scale back when the extra capacity is not needed, thus creating efficiencies and savings – gone are the days when enterprise pay for servers to sit dormant.

In previous years, security concerns meant that mission critical data was largely stored in private cloud environments with less sensitive data stored on the public cloud. Not until recently have businesses felt comfortable placing vital data in the public cloud.

However, advancements in security protocols and increasing support from cloud management partners has meant more widespread adoption. Businesses are recognising that teams of expert AWS technicians working around the clock to protect their data can be more effective than a sole in-house technician protecting a private cloud. The disparity of manpower and resources available to each option makes hyperscale cloud appealing to a lot of businesses.

Managing migration

There is a clear adoption path for the majority of businesses, which sees them move from on-premise to a hybrid IT delivery model. Businesses taking their first tentative steps into cloud computing will often begin with migration of non-mission critical application to the public cloud. This will be coupled either with a migration of some private and business-critical data to a private cloud environment cloud or maintaining the on-premise data centre for mission critical applications.

In this context, managed hyperscale cloud adoption, with seamless integration of on-premise and private cloud, means business can take full advantage of the scalability and cost benefits of the public cloud in a complex hybrid environment.

The road ahead

Every enterprise IT leader should be considering some sort of cloud strategy today. In five years, we will continue to see a move towards hyperscale cloud with businesses hosting all of their applications in the public cloud. We are already starting to see this, with some media companies entrenched in hyperscale cloud.

We will also start to see changes in cloud charges. There will be a time when people look at term-less contracts, which will be a paradigm change for the industry.

However, the hyperscale cloud industry’s biggest threat – as with many areas of technology – is that there is a distinct skills shortage of AWS and Microsoft Azure technicians capable of managing these environments. This global trend will have to be addressed for hyperscale cloud to deliver the substantive and fundamental industry change that it has the potential to bring.