By Mark Lewis, Chief Marketing Officer at Pulsant
Businesses migrating from a single, public Cloud provider has been the direction of travel of UK digital infrastructure for years.
Most recently, research from Vanson Bourne demonstrated that 87% of enterprise CIOs plan to move away partially or fully from the public Cloud over the next two years whilst Gartner predicts that organisations are set to migrate 20% of existing workloads from global public Clouds to local or regional alternatives by the end of 2026.
The questions now facing the industry are where are these workloads headed, and how are they going to get there?
Reshaping Cloud strategy: cost, performance, compliance, AI
We first need to define what is ‘right’ when it comes to a given workload. While this changes from business to business, there are four main drivers: Cost, performance, compliance, and the ‘future’ demands of AI.
When it comes to cost, the most significant driver is the predictability of the compute demand. Accommodating spikes in demand was – and remains – a key selling point for the public Cloud as businesses pay for what they consume. However, businesses have come to realise that ‘always on,’ steady-state workloads are often cheaper on owned or co-located hardware.
Recent repatriation has been driven by enterprises moving such stable workloads to avoid the “Cloud tax” of constant uptime. These savings are often then set against the egress fees charged by public Cloud providers to move data out of their ecosystem.
Regarding performance, hybrids built around on-premise, colocation or even regionally-based private Cloud offer shorter distances for data transit, and thus the low latency that is critical to so many businesses. Edge computing is built upon processing data closer to where it is collected.
This improves throughput and decreases the loads on centralised servers. The speed of response is at the heart of how performance interacts with cost. ‘Lag tax’ is the hidden cost a business pays when data travels further than it should. Most businesses are paying it without knowing – it is typically seen in speeds slower than ten milliseconds. It shows up as delayed decisions, inconsistent performance, inflated bandwidth costs, and compliance exposure.
Compliance has become a dominant factor shaping this spending behind hybrid cloud choices. Vanson Bourne research has found that 79% of businesses cite sovereignty and residency considerations as a major influence upon their digital infrastructure investment.
There is a general increase in the workloads that demand a secure, sovereign private Cloud, or even the security that can only be guaranteed by colocation or on-premise infrastructure. In the face of GDPR fines, and increased cyber threats, businesses demand the option of local control of their data.
Lastly, there is the context of the demands of AI. AI has already forced businesses to reassess putting the right workload in the right place. Edge-based private Clouds or colocation options suit inference AI (to be near the end-user) but large-scale training for generative AI demands public hyperscale. For AI workloads, the “cost of distance” is high, so any model that prevents the expenses of data replication and transit – such as Edge – is welcome.
It is important to remember that businesses adopt hybrid architectures because they perceive a clear set of benefits: flexibility across environments that mitigates operational risk; compliance and data sovereignty; optimised performance; and the modernisation of legacy systems that are both expensive and a single point of failure.
Thus, once the question of where to migrate to has been addressed, the business needs to assess how it will get there.
Migration without disruption: strategies for making the move
The first step in a placement strategy that decides where workloads should run is a full assessment of existing applications and usage. Typically, the most common approach for businesses looking to move to a hybrid infrastructure is to identify workloads that have a predictable, consistent resource consumption and migrate them from public Cloud to private Cloud or colocation.
This reduces ongoing costs and – when using a sovereign provider – keeps the data in-country.
This brings us to the realm of re-platforming. This involves containerising the workload and moving to a regional Edge facility closer to the actual users. This allows the app to “burst” to the public Cloud for massive scale, but run daily operations on the edge for lower latency.
Migrating workloads out of restrictive public Cloud means that databases can exploit high-performance, sovereign private Cloud while maintaining the application’s core code. Businesses gain much greater cost predictability and control, while keeping the automation benefits of the Cloud.
The benefits of modernisation can be realised without excessive development costs. By moving to sovereign, regional infrastructure, the organisation can ensure compliance with necessary legislation, whilst phased migrations reduce operational risk.
Making it work: managing workloads across multiple environments
Once a business has begun a hybrid Cloud migration, it faces the immediate concern of managing workloads across multiple environments. Interoperability – in particular making sure systems work together to enable growth and scale – is vital.
The first step in ensuring interoperability is visibility. Single portals are critical tools to enable businesses to manage workloads across private Cloud, on-premise hardware, and public hyperscale. Visibility prevents operational “lock-in” because if a workload needs to scale, everything remains consistent.
Next, systems must “work together” at scale. Pulsant has invested extensively in its robust, 400Gbps private network, integrated with Megaport and LINX, to turn an estate of 14 data centres into Cloud on-ramps, which deliver consistent scale from anywhere in the UK.
The last step is to foster an ecosystem of service partners who build interoperable solutions on this infrastructure. The goal is that any new business can “plug in and play” new services from the partner community without a full architectural redesign.
A hybrid Cloud migration represents a huge opportunity to realign a business and its infrastructure. It should offer the opportunity to cut cost, reduce exposure to risk, improve resilience, and enable a business to focus on scale.
Author biography:
Mark Lewis joined Pulsant as CMO in 2022.With over 20 years of experience in technology marketing, Mark began his career at 3Com Corporation and has held senior roles at Vodafone, Sony, and Criteo. He also spent five years leading corporate and field marketing at Interxion and Digital Realty. Before joining Pulsant, Mark was responsible for the commercial development of data centre ecosystems at Iron Mountain.
