On-Premises Cloud: Real flexibility or just a finance plan?
Conclusion: Paying for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) which is kept on-premises, but paid for on an Opex model rather than as a Capex outlay, is often positioned as ‘Cloud-like’. There can be use cases and specific workloads where this model makes sense and does give some advantages to the organisation.
However, on-premises management of an organisation’s own Cloud can be lacking in the degree of flexibility and pace of innovation that can be achieved when compared to some of the larger and more successful public Cloud offerings such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.
Organisations need to weigh up specific use cases and workloads and determine the optimal balance of when to use ‘on-premises’ Cloud versus public Cloud.
About The Advisor
Peter Hall
Peter Hall was an IBRS advisor between 2016 and 2020 who covered enterprise infrastructure, management, managing vendor and customer relationships, vendor capabilities and vendor offerings. Peter is also experienced in Start-Up’s and Mergers and Acquisitions. Peter has over 37 years of experience working in the IT sector in ANZ and Asia Pacific, gaining invaluable insights into vendor offerings and strategies, relationship management, and channel strategies. Peter’s an experienced executive having worked for Hewlett-Packard, Blade Network Technologies (acquired by IBM in 2010), IBM and Lenovo. Peter is also an accredited Tony Buzan Licensed Instructor in Mind Mapping.