Top public cloud myths debunked by our experts

Don’t believe all the ‘facts’ about public cloud

Despite wide-scale adoption, many myths still exist around public cloud and its suitability for different applications and scenarios. Spoiler alert – there is no silver bullet to creating the perfect multi-cloud model for your organisation. However, separating fact from fiction will help you avoid the most common cloud selection mistakes.

Many organisations developing and executing on a cloud migration strategy find the multi-cloud model a tricky one to get right in the first instance. This is not helped by the many stories around public cloud suitability or how public cloud stacks up against private cloud options. The conversation can go in circles on what is best and what cloud can do what, but what is the best strategy moving forward. Although there isn’t a ‘catch all’ solution, help knowing the facts will help you choose the best public cloud provider for your company.

Public Cloud Myth #1: You should go “all in” with one public cloud vendor

We see a lot of businesses going “all-in” with one public cloud vendor. This is largely due to the existing skillset and familiarity of a specific platform within the IT team or because their technology partner is aligned to only one public cloud vendor.

The public cloud market is constantly evolving. While it’s true today that AWS, Azure and Google dominate the market for IaaS, there is an ever-increasing list of public cloud options. Also, the fiercely competitive nature of the public cloud market means there is a constant release cycle of updated features and capabilities. At any given point in time, each public cloud provider will have its own unique strengths, benefits and differentiators which will vary as they evolve their offerings to capture greater market share.

This maelstrom of public cloud competition is great news for your business and one that should be factored into your cloud strategy. By only considering one public cloud vendor, you are limiting your capacity to match (and move) individual workloads to their best-fit

Public Cloud Myth #2: Assume ‘like for like’

Another public cloud myth we come across – and one that can hamper your ability down the track to scale or provide you with the resilience you need – is that the technology of the workload determines the best cloud platform.

Public Cloud Myth #3: Once you have moved to the public cloud, you are done

The final public cloud myth that we come across is once your business has migrated to the cloud – you are done and will continue to use that platform for the foreseeable future. This is a serious problem when it comes to managing any cloud – private or public. When choosing a multi-cloud strategy, it requires ongoing maintenance, support, management and optimisation. Cloud platforms and applications are transforming as quickly as companies are adopting them and those improvements should be leveraged in your cloud platform.

Choosing a public cloud platform

It is important to separate fact from fiction when choosing a cloud platform.

Making a decision using the rationales outlined above alone could lead to other mistakes down the track. To really choose the right public cloud for your business, it is a more involved and critical process – picking a cloud affects the whole business operations and services.

You need to consider how choosing a cloud platform might impact the business through:

1. Architecture: it is very important to make a high level comparison of your proposed architecture in potential cloud environments and come up with a quantitative comparison on parameters like security, scalability and optimisation. For example, a single Google cloud VPC can span multiple regions without communicating across the public internet. This could be a desirable feature in your architecture. Getting basic architecture wrong is probably the most expensive mistake you can make while moving to the cloud.
2. Security and compliance: each cloud provider has a different set of security controls and policies, and industry certifications (see, for example, AWS Compliance Programs). These need to match with your own organisation’s security requirements and risk management approach, as well as any regulatory or industry compliance obligations you have.
3. Disaster recovery and business continuity: does the cloud provider meet the level of resilience and redundancy you need? For example, do they have data centres in multiple geographic regions in line with your DR strategy? Currently, AWS data centres In Australia are 100% located in Sydney, whereas Azure has data centres in Sydney and Melbourne.. Facts like these should be included in your decision-making.
4. Flexibility: how do you avoid vendor lock-in, and can you move your software licenses around in the future? Interoperability between public clouds will become increasingly desirable and available as cloud becomes more mainstream and universal cloud standards are developed, so you need to ensure your cloud architecture is not too closely coupled to that vendor’s PaaS environment.
5. Capital and operational expenditure: each cloud provider has different cost models and ways of charging for its services so comparing billing models is a valuable exercise. While you might be making some initial cost savings by moving to the cloud, you need to make calculations on what cost model will work best for you in the future.

From a long-term perspective, you also need to factor in each cloud provider’s roadmap including future ability to deliver and how well it matches with your own organisation’s strategic direction.

Managed services partner

We understand that executing a multi-cloud strategy can be a daunting task and we’re here to help.

At Interactive, our team takes into account all of the parameters involved in building the ideal cloud model. This is mapped to each organisation’s unique environment and set of requirements, producing a list of comparative benefits that makes decision-making easier to help you avoid a lot of the cloud procurement mistakes that organisations are making today.

With our team of public cloud experts, we help customers save an average of 30% on their spend through optimisation and management of their platform.