While the cloud has become mainstream for businesses and federal agencies alike, some common misconceptions remain about what it really is and what it means to move to the cloud. In a recent blog post by Kostas Roungeris, Cisco Cloud SME for the Europe, Middle East, Africa and Russia (EMEAR) region, he outlines a few of these myths below:
- Everything doesn’t need to go. When it comes to moving applications to the cloud, some believe all applications can and should be moved but that is not in fact the case. For example, there are some high performance computing applications that cannot and should not be virtualized.
- Traditional software stacks need to transform. For some organizations, moving to the cloud also means building applications using platform tools (PaaS), where the required application components don’t live in virtual machines (VMs) but are provided as a service commonly referred to as “microservices” or cloud-native development. This means you don’t need to carry the traditional software stack of a virtual or physical “server” to develop or run those applications like an operating system, firmware, and libraries. Another way of trimming this extra fat while still getting the benefit of packaging is via containers. That’s what people want and it’s where the future is, minus of course the lock-in.
- Consumption is online. And lastly, for other organizations, moving to the cloud may just mean consuming software online via a browser or a light-weight app that sources its functionality online. For example, software as a service (SaaS) applications like Office365, Salesforce, WebEx, and Spark do not require you to host the service. And let’s not forget the apps that we are bringing every day to the corporate network such as Facebook, Spotify, and WhatsApp.
Software offered as a service can be a complimentary or management toolset for other software or even for a hardware device, such as security or analytics applications that effectively contribute to reducing the overall complexity of IT itself. This is what we loosely refer to as a Cloud-based or a Cloud-managed service, emphasizing the subscription aspect of cloud – i.e. consuming something as a service (XaaS). In that sense, moving to the cloud relates to a capability or a process that someone else (or you) is managing using a centralized technology-based solution to more efficiently address a business need.
There is simply no vendor or cloud provider that can cater for everything. Even if you just started and you are using a suite of cloud apps (and you should), you will need something to connect to that cloud. As you grow, you might need customized apps or to build your own, and potentially more network capabilities as you have more customers, partners, offices and employees, etc. All the above will go to different “clouds”.
To learn more about best practices to follow as you move to the cloud, contact Westcon-Comstor at cloud@westcon.com.
“Constantine” is the Cisco Cloud SME for the EMEAR region, big fan of all things Cloud Computing and all the different meanings that everyone has for it.
His professional experience has always been focused on the paradigm, via various product and business development positions. To read his full article, go to https://blogs.cisco.com/cloud/cloud-the-truth-is-out-there.
