Why Are Companies Leaving the Public Cloud? Dropbox was the first well known company to leave the Amazon cloud two years ago, deciding to build their own IT infrastructure, and President Trump’s attack on Amazon is reigniting industry tensions.
The top four concerns of IT professionals in adopting a public cloud computing strategy are:
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- security
- achieving governance and compliance goals
- overcoming the challenge of an inexperienced public cloud staff
- vendor lock-in which hinders agility and flexibility
Benefits of Pay-As-You-Go Data Center
In addition, greater control over applications and infrastructure, increased costs as workloads grow, always-on availability, and centralization of technology are also issues driving the transition away from the public cloud.
Scalability is always on the list of key benefits, but it is important to realize that as a company’s workload grows, the public cloud cost can actually become greater than a private cloud or dedicated servers as more features and resources are used. For companies in financial services, healthcare, legal or other regulated sectors, compliance issues are also causing many firms to remain rooted in dedicated IT options.
Many companies who jumped into Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure with both feet and now want to leave the public cloud, don’t have the capital or resources to build-out their own facility. Using the colocation services of a purpose-built, pay-as-you-go data center is a reliable and secure alternative embraced by more and more enterprises every day. The benefits are significant:
- Technical expertise
- Disaster recovery preparedness
- Support services to provide on-site assistance
- Affordability by turning a traditional capital expense into a low operating expense
- Flexibility to pay-as-you-go, increasing or decreasing your physical space, power and IT requirement as your needs change
- 100% uptime reliability
- 24/7/365 network monitoring by a team of technical professionals
- Connectivity choices providing multiple carrier options under one roof
- Ability to customize hardware to meet specific needs
Government Interference into Amazon’s AWS: Public Cloud Services
President Trump’s tweetstorm has shined the light on government interference and its ability to bar specific companies like Amazon from doing business with the federal government.
This brings into question whether any company, organization, or government agency should go all-in when it comes to public cloud services, since government interference into Amazon’s AWS business could trickle down to their customers in the future. Is this a sign of more to come?
The Department of Defense expects to announce the winner of its cloud services contract in Q4 of this year, so we shall see. Maybe businesses should begin evaluating alternative IT storage and management solutions in case a cyber wall is on its way.