The trend towards public clouds is evermore clear, however, there are still those who prefer to have their own infrastructure. In this article we discuss new elements that discourage persisting in this old practice.
The speed of technological change and business transformation demand that IT departments provision infrastructure in an increasingly agile and flexible manner. It has long been clear that to achieve these goals it is necessary to migrate to public clouds.
In an earlier article, published in 2016, we explained the prevailing trends and benefits obtained by moving from owned infrastructure to hiring infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Today, this stands proven. We can find the largest companies in the world using cloud services, and even mission critical government institutions from many Latin American countries. Even so, there remain cases where the IT departments seek to acquire and maintain infrastructure, whether in their own or third-party datacenters. Why does this happen?
In a few cases there may exist non-technical reasons, such as regulatory issues that forbid or hinder using foreign public clouds. In other cases, there may be technical reasons associated to latencies produced by datacenter’s distances (even though there are mixed alternatives, known as Edge Computing, which we will cover in a future article).
This resistance in adopting public clouds often results from common mistakes made during the evaluation of these alternatives, for example:
Solely with the above examples it is already possible to arrive to an incorrect evaluation of the cloud option, privileging to remain in the traditional practice of owned infrastructure. Added to this is the political resistance of IT departments to retain their dominance over a greater amount of assets, staff, budget, etc.
And finally, strategic factors must not be left out. In the evaluations only immediate technical and economic elements are often taken into consideration, without reviewing change tendencies, which occur evermore faster. Some examples of this are:
Thus, the hardware infrastructure market available to end customers will be increasingly reduced to collector’s items and, progressively, less likely to compete with the enormous flexibility and variety of services offered by public clouds.
In the SAP’s case, the services offered initially by the company, SAP ES (HEC), are all being migrated to AWS, Azure, and GCP. The HEC option on its own datacenters is quickly being diluted. Many SAP clients who lived this alternative are already evaluating public clouds.
Novis currently has a customer base of more than 80 SAP clients with permanent services. In this whole universe, we practically do not find resistance in migrating to the cloud, with few exceptions. For this reason, we have already done more than 20 cloud migrations of SAP solutions, to the three Hyperscalers. It is the client’s choice, but we can evaluate all the alternatives for each specific case, so each company may be able to choose the best option for their case.
You may find more information in our success cases and videos.
Feel free to contact us and discuss your projects. We shall be pleased to be able to advise you.
Author: Glen Canessa