Insight

Record Breaking Performance

It’s that season again where sport is dominating the headlines and screens are filled with athletes competing and pushing themselves to achieve their absolute best on the world stage of the Olympics. Everyone is striving to attain the top performing gold medal and make their home country proud

Like Paul O’Donovan and Fintan McCarthy, who won Ireland’s first gold medal of the Tokyo Olympics on Thursday with a stunning victory in the lightweight men’s double sculls. Hours on the water and years of training paid off.

In a humorous interview with the BBC, asked how being an Olympic gold medal-winning athlete sounded, O’Donovan said: “It’s alright, yeah. You can’t complain about it really. I wouldn’t go around introducing myself like that though.”

He seems fully aware and not at all bothered that the Olympic coverage will fade over time and will likely be happy to get back on the water and “do what we always do, the best we can.”

Some similarities could be drawn to the initial hype around Public Cloud. When first launched over a decade ago it promised infinite scale, global reach, on-demand flexibility, rapid deployment, super low unit cost and consumption based ‘only pay for what you use’ billing.

Public Cloud has delivered on all these areas.  In most cases exceeding expectations. The exception to this is costs – the reality of the super low unit cost and consumption-based billing model, is increased costs.  Not the savings everyone expected.

There is no doubt that if time is spent using cost calculators available (note: these are sales and marketing tools), the numbers always look favourable.  However, the unit-based costs are allocated to absolutely everything – including things that happen ‘under the hood’ on the platform that most people don’t understand, let alone know how to translate their own requirements and use cases to.

This is in absolutely no way a failing or misrepresentation by Public Cloud providers.  They’ve been upfront and honest with their transparent pricing and low unit costs.  It’s simple misunderstanding, people getting carried away with all the hype, that has led most businesses to expect to achieve considerable cost savings, by moving to Public Cloud.

There will always be examples of companies that have achieved reduced costs.  However, organisations that are heavy users of IT or applications, or just have heavy applications, often, will have realised considerably higher costs post move.

In addition to increased costs, another unexpected or undesired realisation is lack of certainty or predictability around monthly costs.  Cloud infrastructure and resources are not consumed in a uniform or consistent way, leading to variables that are difficult to predict, manage, and in some cases impossible to control, leaving budget holders with an unenviable task.

Public Cloud does, and will, always have its place. 

However, companies that have embraced these platforms should begin to review their longer-term strategies; and consider a multi-cloud operating model which is becoming ever more prevalent.  Which involves moving those applications that don’t necessarily need global reach or hyper scale whilst still having access to all the other goodness that Cloud offers. Including typically high levels of performance, that can be delivered close to their end users

No matter where you are on your journey, it’s important to review and assess regularly to make sure you are embracing the technologies and platforms that allows you to evolve and adapt, and not be locked in to any one vendor or platform.

Not all clouds are created equally.   

No one size fits all.  It will take a hybrid and multi cloud approach and operating model to best fit all your requirements (known and unknown).  That may include public cloud, but most likely will incorporate specialist private and hybrid cloud platforms managed by trusted partners and delivered closer to home, and importantly closer to your end users.

OSG provides an enterprise grade private and hybrid cloud platform, with guaranteed performance, recoverability, with predictable commercials.

For us it will never be about the hype but doing the best we can with the technology available to ensure your business can always access gold medal standard cloud services and solutions.

Get in touch to discuss how we can help your business leverage cloud.