Issue link: https://insights.oneneck.com/i/1200933
Hybrid IT For Dummies, HPE Special Edition 8 These materials are © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. Some people refer to this phenomenon as cloud cliff. The early party days of the public cloud resulted in some nasty hangovers, which have pushed people to rethink how they approach the service. They're not necessarily going all tee totaler with regard to cloud, but they're warily adopting ser vices in a far more targeted way, which is as it should be. If someone tells you that a single solution is the only solution that is right 100 percent of the time, he's 100 percent mislead ing you. The real and perceived benefits of public cloud Now, don't put down the book thinking that I hate cloud. I don't! In fact, the public cloud carries with it a number of real and perceived benefits that are important to understand. First, let's talk economics. For many cloud services, the initial capital expenditure that you need to fork out to get started is exactly $0. You simply pay for what you use, a model that means that your operational budget is tapped rather than your capital budget. It also means that you're not paying for services that you don't directly use. For many chief financial officers (CFOs), this is a dream. Instant scalability is another hallmark of the public cloud. If you need more of something — more virtual machines, more compute, more storage — you simply provision it and start paying for it. You don't need to wait for an IT staff person to order additional hardware and deploy it. Sometimes, though, you don't need to scale up. Instead, you need to scale things back a bit as workload demands diminish. This is one area in which public clouds trounce on‐premises infrastructure. Even in the most well‐designed on‐premises environment, when you've added hardware to the environ ment to handle new workload needs, you're probably not going to get rid of that hardware once that need has passed. The capability for the public cloud to support elastic resource consumption is a strength.