By Tony Asaro and Bruce Kornfeld
In part one of this blog series, we discussed the hype that cloud brought when it was first introduced, and shared some research to show where the state of the market is today. In part two we’ll address the state of the edge, and considerations when choosing between onsite IT versus public cloud solutions. The link to listen to the replay on demand at your convenience is here.
A key growth area for onsite IT is being driven by large amounts of data created outside the traditional datacenter. Edge computing is fundamentally outside of the primary datacenter, in organizations with lots of smaller remote or branch offices, like banks and retail stores.
Downtime is arguably the biggest pain point for edge computing sites because there are usually mission-critical applications running which can have a huge financial impact with downtime. It can also take time to get people and parts onsite to get the system back up and running.
Onsite IT can be an excellent solution for small data centers and branch sites since it provides a flexible environment that is simple to manage and cost effective. The same high performing technology used by datacenters, simplified for the edge, at a fraction of the cost of outsourced cloud solutions.
An example of the top public cloud use cases include SaaS, backup and data analytics. It’s also gaining adoption quickly for newer trends like the open source system Kubernetes. And Shadow IT is actually a major use case for public cloud, much to the chagrin of IT departments.
But any time IT considers outsourcing any part of the infrastructure outside of the company, there is often risk associated with these decisions that include performance, security, compliance, recoverability, best practices, control and balancing the complex ecosystem associated with running applications optimally. Many companies continue to build onsite for pure peace of mind, and control of their applications and data.
So where are we in 2019? Cloud and SaaS are booming, and on premises IT is also growing. We have found that is often use case driven and that most IT departments understand what value the public cloud has and what works best within their own data centers. In 2019, we’re seeing customers are adopting both onsite and public cloud technologies as the solution can be complimentary when used together.
Follow us to continue the discussion on Twitter @TonyAsaroIO and @BruceKornfeld.
Tony Asaro is the CEO and Founder of the INI Group. Asaro has extensive experience and expertise on storage subsystems, NAS solutions, data management software and SAN infrastructure. Asaro has worked in the high tech industry for more than 30 years as a systems engineer, product manager, marketing and business development professional and analyst.
Bruce Kornfeld is an experienced technology executive who has held leadership roles at Compellent, Dell and NCR in marketing, alliances and business development in the storage, server, networking and software industries. He joined StorMagic in 2017 as CMO, and today serves as general manager of the Americas, where he is responsible for the Americas region sales and go-to-market strategy, as well as global strategic alliances and marketing
