We all think we know what cloud computing is, but when you ask different people to provide a definition it’s interesting to see the different responses that come back.
Cloud Computing is about providing IT services as a utility over the internet. That can be compute, storage, total infrastructure, applications or even turnkey software.
The beauty of cloud is that in theory, you can consume what you want when you need it and turn it off again when you no longer need it, you pay for what you consume and you avoid building costly on premise infrastructure which potentially can be heavily underutilised.
Enterprise cloud resides behind a firewall and delivers cloud computing infrastructure, software and services to an enterprise. The main differentiator here is that cloud services are being provided to an enterprise class business. This means the demands on those cloud services are vastly different from consumer grade cloud services.
There is some overlap, consumers may use a cloud storage service such as dropbox and many businesses also use a version of this service in their own enterprise cloud strategy. For the most part though, the overlap is thin. Enterprise cloud needs to provide enterprise grade processing power, reduced costs, reduced management, flexibility and most of all business-critical data protection and data security.
Whilst enterprise cloud has traditionally been consumed “as a Service” the technological building blocks of enterprise cloud has become available to IT managers, enabling to build their own hosted or on premise enterprise cloud. Companies like Nutanix have led the way with hyperconverged technology. This technology allows compute, networking and storage to be allocated and managed via software, it modular and as hardware resources run thin, hyperconverged nodes can be added to a “cluster” instantly expanding platform resources without disruption.
You can be forgiven for thinking this sounds a lot like cloud, because in effect hyperconverged allows you to take advantage of enterprise cloud capability but do so completely under your own control.
Enterprise cloud should:
Reduce IT costs
Be highly scalable without disruption
Enable quick allocation and re-allocation of resources
Drive competitive advantage by speeding up development and implementation time
Be highly secure and protected.
The options for enterprise cloud started by consuming services from specialist cloud providers. That remains an option. However, through implementation of hyperconverged solutions such as those available from companies like Nutanix IT managers are finding it simple to build and manage in house enterprise cloud capability for themselves.
