Are Your Workloads in the Right Cloud?

Many organisations have a “Cloud First” inclination when considering where to place their workloads. But is going all in on any one environment the right approach? Some may see the public cloud as their only option toward modernisation, but this type of strategy leads many organisations down a sub-optimal path. Yes, the public cloud will be an important part of any organisation’s IT solution going forward, but that doesn’t mean one should dissipate the use of all other environments. Many workloads are best suited in private cloud or edge environments.

Think of it like putting your groceries away. Each item is stored in your home based on how soon it will be used, whether or not it is perishable, how much space is required, and proximity to where you will be cooking and eating. You wouldn’t store frozen meats in the pantry, as they would go bad, nor would you keep excess family-sized cereal boxes, that you won’t eat for months, in the refrigerator. Keeping all your food items in one storage space would be easiest, but it would not be optimal. So you decide whether each item should live in the refrigerator, freezer, pantry, cupboards, and so forth.

For most people, the decision-making process behind determining where each food item should be stored is done subconsciously. But getting it right with all of your clouds? That’s not quite as straightforward. Identifying the right place to store each of your workloads and data is imperative in optimising resources and performance.

Which workloads make the most sense in a private cloud?

  • Organisations often feel most comfortable keeping workloads that command extra security, compliance, and control in a private cloud. Those with extremely sensitive information, such as in healthcare, financial, or government verticals, greatly benefit from the control that private clouds offer.
  • Workloads that require low latency are best kept in the private cloud or out at the edge, where the data is stored closest to where it is used in real time. Moving large amounts of data to and from the public cloud and at great distances can pose challenges to the flow of work in your organisation.
  • Some organisations have existing footprints of legacy applications that may be poorly suited for cloud environments. Not all applications can be re-written or re-platformed to take advantage of cloud architectures, and for those that can, the processes of re-writing and re-platforming can be extremely expensive and time-consuming.
  • Applications that require more than “four nines” of availability, or whose monetary penalty from the CSPs that fail to maintain a certain availability level is inconsequential compared to the sheer cost of downtime, might be a better fit for the private cloud. At the end of the day, it comes down to a calculation comparing any potential risk of downtime with the potential gains from leveraging public cloud capabilities.
  • Workloads that won’t benefit from cloud economics may also be best kept in the private cloud. If you’re only paying for what you need, applications that fluctuate in usage patterns could see large benefits in the public cloud. However, in steady state workloads, it’s oftentimes more efficient to size the infrastructure needed for the year and run it in the data centre. Ingress and egress fees can also amount quickly when workloads are repeatedly moved back and forth from the public cloud.

Which workloads make the most sense in a public cloud or other environments?

  • Some workloads have cyclical varying demands for capacity, and these demands may be seasonal or have unpredictable patterns. While private clouds offer some flexibility, public clouds offer even more in increasing capacity on-demand. This capability, as well as consumers’ ability to pay for what they use, makes the public cloud an appealing resource for these types of workloads (DevTest, for example).
  • For organisations looking to expand into an area where they do not have a data centre, a public cloud could make it easier to deliver apps to this new geographic region.
  • For organisations that need rapid expansion capabilities to meet massive demand, public cloud offers immediate access to limitless compute. While private clouds have made great strides in financial models, capacity planning, self-service, and rapid installation of expansion nodes, the public cloud offers the advantage of being able to allocate new resources at rapid speeds vs. its on-premises counterpart.
  • The ability to tap into native cloud services drives many organisations to the public cloud. By leveraging CSPs for services that are not core competencies for the organisation, it allows them to invest time and money into other priorities.

Choosing where each of your workloads should reside is never going to be as easy as putting your groceries away. But by going into your decision-making process with a better understanding of which workloads will favour one environment or another, you’ll be better prepared to optimise all the different environments. Dell Technologies provides the solutions your organisation needs to reimagine your cloud experience. We can help you find the best environment for each workload based on your business needs. For more on optimising workload placement across public cloud, private cloud, and edge environments, check out this Workload Placement Checklist, and the corresponding IDC White Paper.

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About the Author: Eve Falk

Eve Falk is an Analyst on the Dell Technologies Cloud product marketing team. She enjoys the strategic and creative nature of her role, which focuses on messaging and thought leadership initiatives. After graduating from the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst, Eve joined the Marketing Development Program at Dell Technologies. Previously, she competed a 1-year rotation on the Competitive Intelligence team.