Four Problems with Public Cloud & Easy Fixes

Introduction

It’s very unlikely that a cloud-only infrastructure will ever be the best choice for businesses.

There are a lot of challenges that the cloud can’t solve, and some challenges that have been created by the cloud. These roadblocks can cause financial or technical stresses that prevent cloud-only environments from being the best option for the vast majority of users.

Whether you’re a CTO, a CIO, an IT Director, or a CFO, this should be a key driver towards finding improvements to your current IT strategy- and pivoting towards a bare metal enhanced hybrid infrastructure could be the solution that allows you to continue maximizing output whilst minimizing spend.

From increased power and storage on a budget-to-budget basis to clearer billing and easier management, bare metal is growing as the backbone of cloud-mature businesses as it resolves key issues that cloud integration causes, or fails to solve, whilst still enabling flexibility and scalability- and you should consider its place in your business as a result.

Let’s take a look at the top 4 problems bare metal infrastructure solves better than cloud, and why hybridizing with bare metal might be the best fit for your organization!

Problem 1: Bill Scaling & Limit Bursting

Cloud servers are a great way to share resources amongst multiple users. However, this has limited cost effectiveness, and on a large scale, it can become counter-productive to run compute exercises in the cloud.

As with all ‘pay as you grow’ cloud resources, your cloud bill will scale with your usage. The benefit of this is that you’ll always have additional resources on hand when needed; the downside is that you need to keep a close eye on how much cloud resource you’re consuming at all times to avoid using resources you can’t afford.

Problem 2: Noisy Neighbours

Public Cloud and VPS servers are inherently multitenant. When using shared hardware, you’re also at the mercy of how the server is being utilized by the other tenants.

If another user's standard instance begins to run resource-intensive applications on the same server that your public cloud is being hosted on, they will consume resources that would otherwise be allocated for your business.

If you're using standard instances, this will cause you to immediately lose 50% of your performance as the server cores begin to divide cycles between users. If you're using the cheaper spot instances, you’ll experience performance failures, and applications can stop entirely.

Problem 3: The Data Egress Trap

Data egress charges occur when data leaves a network (in this case, the cloud platform) and goes somewhere else. These charges are surprisingly common, as they apply whenever applications need to use data hosted in the cloud for tasks such as data analysis.

They're also difficult to anticipate, as they are billed exclusively in arrears, meaning that users, employees, applications, and workflows will extract data from cloud storage and rack up huge data-egress fees that won’t be revealed until the bill ultimately arrives.

Problem 4: Compliance & Security

Becoming a cloud-mature business comes with a lot of growing pains, and one of the largest challenges you’ll face will be maintaining security standards whilst setting up and integrating cloud-based workflows into your existing architecture.

Most industries require the businesses they work with to meet stringent security standards to ensure the data of end users is always protected, and that no participants of the market can be suddenly held to ransom.

These standards can be particularly hard to meet if you’re placing your data within multi-tenant public cloud environments.

Article Source: THG Ingenuity Cloud Services

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