At the beginning of every year, it is natural to look ahead and make predictions for what the year may hold. Earlier this month, we asked Comstor’s Geoff Fancher for his thoughts on cloud, collaboration, and more. We also reached out to partners to get their perspectives. Luke Norris, CEO and founder of Peak, an enterprise-class Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud service provider to channel partners, shared his thoughts with us. Read more below:
EDGE360:Tell us about how cloud services will evolve in 2015?
Luke Norris: 2015 will see a heavy focus on the hybrid cloud and its many meanings. The melding of a multi-cloud approach, whether it’s on-premise private cloud to public, or public cloud to public, will drive a new breed of modular cloud solutions. Imagine starting with individual cloud building blocks and then mixing and matching and fine-tuning each cloud module so that it is perfectly custom-tailored to a customer’s needs. This approach will allow the adaptive enterprise to truly receive the best combination of service options, and also blend them seamlessly into their existing IT environment for their either internal staff or external customers.
EDGE360: How will cloud choice impact how solution providers offer services to customers?
Norris: A customer’s initial starting point (their existing degree of virtualization in their environment) will drive their five year hybrid cloud strategy. While Peak offers hybrid, private and public cloud solutions, a common strategy we see is a hybrid cloud environment between an on-premise private cloud on enterprise systems connected to Peak’s public cloud. The mix and match of resources, with similar features and management, drive a single solution with mutual value-add. This can be seen as storage replication to like platforms or seamless layer 2 integration with Peak Direct connect and Cisco InterCloud technologies.
EDGE360: What should buyers beware of when it comes to selecting cloud solutions?
Norris: Buyers should focus on TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) for discrete cloud units. In other words, ask yourself what is my total cost of ownership over the next five years after I tally up my compute AND storage AND network needs. Don’t just price out a basic cloud block needed today. And, don’t just look at storage per GB pricing in isolation — puts and gets pricing can dramatically drive up storage cost.
Many other TCO comparisons can be complicated to decipher – such as Internal bandwidth between resources, bandwidth between sites, variable compute instances, retrieval of archival data, reserved resources, and unused instances – so, challenge and lean on your cloud provider to ensure sure they educate you on the long-term values & costs of your cloud projects through TCO discussions.
