Over the past few years, it has become crystal clear that the
future of enterprise computing, at least in the short-term, is not in the
cloud. But it's not in resource-heavy on-premise private networks, either.
Instead, business owners have overwhelmingly decided that they prefer to have a
foot in both camps.
The big tech companies have had to adjust their focus in response
to this demand, and some have found it to be much tougher sledding than others.
At the dawn of 2020, all the big players in the public cloud space can now
legitimately say that they offer a genuine hybrid cloud solution.
Business owners looking to develop a hybrid architecture over the coming
months and years now have a decision to make: Which cloud provider is most
suited to my specific use case?
If one were to point to one specific textbook case of first-mover
advantage in the 21st Century, it's Amazon's domination of the
public cloud space. Having secured roughly a third of the entire market, AWS is
well out in front in terms of compute resources and storage capacity. It was
also the first player to recognize the need for a cloud direct
connect service, launching AWS
Direct Connect in 2012, a full two years before Microsoft followed suit
with Azure ExpressRoute. With powerful in-house security, low prices and huge
economies of scale behind it, AWS is able to serve both the smallest and
largest enterprises in kind.
However, there are two distinct advantages that Microsoft offers which
could sway more businesses in their direction - and it may also explain Microsoft's
largely-unexpected surge in market share.
First, Microsoft's on-premise products are already installed and
comfortably familiar to many enterprise users (Azure is built around Windows
Server, the .NET framework and Visual Studio). Second, they are not Amazon. For
business owners in the retail sector in particular, a prime motivation for
avoiding AWS is to not continue to uplift a direct competitor - especially one
who is already the dominant power in their industry.
Under Satya Nadella, Microsoft has also been much more open to
collaborating with cloud-based and open source communities, balancing their
clear strength in the on-premise space.
While AWS and Azure are equally viable alternatives for businesses
of all sizes, Google Cloud Platform and IBM Cloud are focusing more on mid to
large corporations. In terms of enterprise appeal, Google and IBM have two very
different (polar opposite, in fact) USPs.
For Google, the decision to accept the inevitability of a hybrid
cloud future came relatively late in the game. Up until recently, GCP seemed
committed to a pure, cloud-native future, content with intensively innovating
until the rest of the world caught up with them. While they still hold some
clear Aces up their sleeves (e.g. their cloud-based TensorFlow technology for
machine learning development), they have reluctantly come down to earth. Google
has now started getting their hands dirty by adding services such as elastic
infrastructure, DevOps, big data processing and disaster recovery to their
clients' on-premise systems. Google has also tried to win over enterprise
customers by offering significant cloud
cost reduction with deep corporate discounts.
In complete contrast to Google, IBM come to the table with the
longest service history of any of the Big Four. IBM's brand equity is enough on
its own to win the trust of some boards of directors and as such, IBM is
clearly comfortable in charging more for their services because of their brand
recognition. IBM's main problem until recently was the scattering of their
products and services across different brands (e.g. SoftLayer, Watson, Bluemix,
etc.). The decision to merge and acquire those brands allowed IBM to offer more
products and services than any of their competitors - all under the IBM Cloud
name.
The fascinating battle between the tech giants over the hybrid
cloud space is sure to continue for some time, but in the end, every business
will need to make their decision based on their own specific IT environments
and use cases.
With that in mind, every business owner or key decision maker
would benefit from engaging with a vendor-neutral and highly experienced third
party consulting firm before making any decisions related to hybrid cloud
migrations, deployments and cost optimization. Because even the most advanced
IT staffs at the largest corporations could use a little objective advice from
time to time.
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About the Author
Ben Ferguson is the Vice President and Senior Network
Architect for Shamrock Consulting Group, an industry leader in digital
transformation solutions. Since his departure from Biochemical research in
2004, Ben has built core competencies around cloud direct connects and cloud cost reduction, SD WAN providers, enterprise
wide area network architecture, high density data center deployments,
cybersecurity and VOIP telephony. Ben has designed hundreds of complex networks
for some of the largest companies in the world and he's helped Shamrock become
a top partner of the 3 largest public cloud platforms for AWS, Azure and GCP
consulting. When he takes the occasional break from designing networks, he
enjoys surfing, golf, working out, trying new restaurants and spending time
with his wife, Linsey, his son, Weston and his dog, Hamilton.