As the cloud emerged in the mid 2000’s, organisations were given a choice and found themselves at a crossroads: adopt or remain on-premise.
There is a compelling argument to join the cloud – cloud infrastructure, complexity reduction, cost optimisation, distributed workflow, remote collaboration, scalability, resilience and extra function – which is why cloud adoption has increased since it emerged.
However, the migration of on-premise workflows to cloud workflows is not smooth and despite increased adoption, only 9.1% of total enterprise IT spend goes on cloud computing.
Cloud hesitancy
There are numerous reasons that explain the hesitancy of moving to the cloud:
- Compliance – the cloud doesn’t support some workflows in traditional industries. For example, sensitive data in hospitals can’t leave country.
- Performance – the internet is far from what high performing servers can achieve when it comes to storage.
- Legacy applications and workflows – according to Alexander Lefterov, CEO at Tiger Technology, this represents the biggest barrier to cloud adoption. Applications don’t have the concept of accessing object storage in the cloud.
- Cost – adopting the cloud can be more expensive over a longer period of time.
- Business model – not everyone is keen on the OpEx business model.
- Fear – on-premise businesses are hesitant because of the unknown and misunderstanding of the cloud.
The workflow problem and hybrid solution
Cloud storage is also different to on-premise storage, which traditionally uses file systems that are organised in an equivalent way to how humans think.
Cloud object storage, which was initially created for large scientific projects that contained large unstructured data sets, is the opposite. This can scale and be very resilient, but is not humanly-usable.
“Usability had been sacrificed for scalability,” said Lefterov.
This is a challenge and is why cloud providers offered an alternative approach: hybrid cloud – “a world that is not totally disjointed from the real world,” explained Lefterov.
Hybrid cloud storage allows organisations to move existing, traditional workflows, efficiently and transparently, to the cloud without the fear of disruption. They can pay close attention to managing data and optimising cost.
These hybrid solutions and the concept of edge computing are “Cloud first”, where the applications and data are centered in the cloud.
Tiger Technology argues this approach of “Cloud first” doesn’t work for industries that hold sensitive data.
As an example, high security companies don’t want their data to leave secure premises. Las Vegas airport has built two data centres for this purpose.
Organisations like these or any that house sensitive data require a “On-prem first” hybrid environment, where services are hosted on-premise, but have access to the benefits of the cloud.
“On-prem first”
“On-prem first” gives organisations with sensitive data all the benefits of the cloud, with the security and reliability of storing data on-premise.
Tiger Technology creates this bridge between mission-critical hybrid solutions, allowing organisations the ability; to create “on-prem first” hybrid applications that file system and object storage with full application transparency and wide applicability.
See also: How to deliver the benefits of the public cloud experience on-premise – In the hybrid cloud era, CIOs are increasingly targeting cloud-like infrastructure in the enterprise
