The datacenter is dead. Long live the Cloud

The phenomenon that is cloud is shaking traditional IT to its core. The growth in cloud services is nothing short of exponential. Meanwhile hardware sales for traditional datacenter technologies declines fast. When we launched our Cloud services in the UAE in 2013 the conversation used to be; “Is cloud really viable? Is cloud secure? Should I consider it instead of on premise?”, now the conversation has changed to; “Which cloud is best for which application? How much of our IT can we move to the cloud? When can we migrate to the cloud?”

The role of traditional on premise datacenter has been relegated to that of an area housing routers, firewalls, switches and come legacy applications. So what changed?

The key driver for cloud has been the emergence of Digital transformation. Applications need to be agile, they need to be closer to the customer, they need to be instantly deployable, they need to have high performance and they need to be able to scale instantly. In addition most companies that embrace cloud see significant operational cost savings along with the elimination of Capital Expenditure on IT infrastructure. Companies are using Digital Transformation to launch new services in new markets to generate new revenues and those companies that aren’t are being disrupted in their industries by those that do.

In the past C level execs would ask IT about how to deliver a new initiative. IT would often look at how to engineer the applications required to fit on their existing infrastructure. If new hardware was required a long procurement cycle would commence, after months of analysis perhaps a RFP was offered to the market and after that orders would follow. Delivery times could take months and installation times even longer. From when a company wanted to use a new application to launch a new service to when they were able to, often a year could have past. Even then the new services would be stuck behind corporate firewalls limiting the ability for 3^rd party collaboration and raising security concerns. Such solutions also relied on in-house subject matter experts who would need to be available 24x7.

Cloud has changed the game and those companies embracing it have built a technical debt against those that have not. They can move at speed, firing up new services instantly, placing those services next to their customers for a better customer experience. They are able to scale resources on demand and having those applications outside corporate firewalls allows for significant third party collaboration. The heavy operational cost of running the infrastructure has been removed for them.

We bet the house on Cloud in 2013. It raised some eye brows both internally and externally. But we are glad we did. Our businesses has changed significantly since then. Before cloud we spent a lot of our time consulting on virtualization and explaining different features of the hardware it would run on.  But over the years our role has changed to that of Cloud Service Provider. As a Cloud Service Provider we work with our customers to build them a viable road map to the cloud, we help them migrate and we provide managed cloud services and security cloud services. Our goal is to use cloud to make IT easy and efficient to consume for our customers and to ensure their Digital transformation is successful.