Why Do Enterprise Clouds Fail?
The root cause of all of these enterprise cloud failures is the limitation that companies face when they attempt to build private cloud solutions based upon disjointed sets of hardware and software components.
1. The IT teams built the wrong cloud for the wrong people.
Many private clouds fail when they are built without fully considering needs of the applications and app owners. You need your cloud to be application-centric. Your cloud should leverage pre-set profiles and models for core applications to simplify and lower the cost of management.
2. IT teams built the right private cloud, but became a victim of their own success from lack of agility in adding and reallocating capacity and resources.
Many well-defined private clouds fail when they become a quest to build the perfect cloud from pieces that don’t naturally go together, making upgrades and expansion time-consuming and risky. In addition, the cost recovery model is not often aligned aligned to growth or success of the service, so funding this growth becomes a blocker.
Your cloud should be turnkey, so that you can deploy faster and expand more quickly and move on to using your cloud rather than continually rebuilding your cloud. Private clouds will seldom exist as the sole cloud platform for serving workloads. The public cloud usually has a role to play, and a sucesful private cloud needs to exist inside a wider hybrid cloud ecosystem, not just in isolation.
3. IT teams built a private cloud too limited in vision, preventing them from leveraging a broader range of complementary cloud resources securely and consistently.
Private clouds fail when they lack key cloud capabilities that enable coordinated use of hosted and SaaS cloud services as complements and extensions to internal services. Your cloud should have native integration with clouds from leading SaaS and IaaS cloud providers, so that you can adopt a hybrid cloud model to extend business reach. Deploying a cloud that leverages portioning technologies to enable isolation of key workloads via bare-metal provisioning of resources ensures that you will be able to take advantage of new technologies like microservices and containers without disruption or risk.
The root cause of all of these failures is the limitation that companies face when they attempt to build private cloud solutions based upon disjointed sets of hardware and software components. Such an approach, which is different from traditonal virtualized environments, forces compromises in features, flexibility, and operational efficiency that run counter to the basic purpose of adopting a cloud approach. You need a partner that provides a well-defined cloud platform that reduces set-up and configuration complexity, while also boosting agility and operational efficiency — all without sacrificing reliability and security. Such a cloud platform will dramatically reduce the time and effort required to add/rebalance infrastructure resources in one datacenter and across multiple datacenters around the world.
Even the best designed cloud platform must adapt to changing demands and conditions. You also need a partner who can who has the right set of technical, financial, professional and managed services offerings to facilitate the transition to a cloud model in weeks or months and for the foreseeable future. This partner should also provide solutions that enable control over the movement, protection, and use of data across all cloud environments. Finally, you need a partner who provides insights into rapidly changing requirements and flexibility in the acquisition and payment for cloud resources.