Over the last decade, the race has been on to get to the public cloud. Organisations are finding that not all IT environments and workloads go together. In fact, a lot of businesses are finding that the future of their enterprise workloads is in the private cloud. According to the Barclays CIO Survey 2024, 83% of enterprises are planning to move workloads back to the private cloud.
This shift is being driven by requirements around data privacy and sovereignty, cost, and issues around complexity. Whilst this is something of a reversal of the trend towards public cloud, it is more the case that enterprises now better understand where public cloud should play a role. Public cloud is the place you go when you need elasticity of demand and high workloads, but when you want to be able to customise a high visibility and controlled, secure environment that can also drive business innovation, the private cloud is the platform you need.
Knowing Where to Start
Enterprises might be adopting a hybrid approach to build themselves best-of-both-worlds IT infrastructure, but that does not mean they are willing to compromise.
Organisations expect their private cloud environments to deliver modern IT infrastructure, provide a cloud experience for developers, and come with robust security and resilience. Of course, they also want these solutions to deliver a lower total cost of ownership as well. Enterprises need experienced partners to help them achieve these objectives, relying on them for their expertise in industry-leading private cloud platforms and reconfiguring complex IT environments into something that is simplified and fit for purpose.
A lot of organisations have siloed compute, storage and networking environments, leaving plenty of room for improvement in their cloud environments. By their nature, siloes do not work together and this complexity makes it really hard for organisations to move quickly. It is not uncommon for a developer to raise a ticket for a virtual machine and have to wait weeks for it, massively slowing the ability to innovate and drive the business forward. By virtualising the entire IT environment, modern private cloud platforms simplify the environment and allow you to deliver microservices internally – just as you would get in the public cloud – making it much easier for IT teams to provision and manage cloud services at a high velocity.
Asking the Right Questions
For those in the channel looking to help their customers make the best of their hybrid environment, there are a few things that they need to be looking out for. These include looking at whether they are having difficulties manage multiple siloes of applications; if they are being asked to increase the return on investment from existing or reduced budgets; or looking to increase their capacity for existing or new workloads, something which is true in many enterprises that are building out their use of machine learning and AI use cases.
Once they have a firm grip on the customer’s objectives, channel partners have a range of support and services that they can draw on to develop a tailored cloud solution that will help them deliver customer success. These advanced and professional services have a key role to play in helping enterprises navigate the crossroads they find themselves at and augment their in-house teams, for whom having all the technical knowledge and qualifications necessary to manage multi-cloud environments is essentially impossible and unaffordable. Such services include cloud readiness assessments to establish the potential migration challenges and provide a well-defined migration plan and cloud automation services that allow IT teams to easily manage the deployment and lifecycle management of virtual machines. Such services are crucial.
Channel partners can use them to ensure success against the customer’s objectives but also elevate the value they provide, enhancing their own offerings and building stronger, more robust customer relationships and businesses.
Leaving Legacy Behind
This move towards modern hybrid cloud infrastructure is only being accelerated by the adoption of AI across the enterprise. Whether it is in code generation, contact centres, or for the optimisation of IT operations, organisations need a cloud platform that can support major GPU technologies and give them confidence in the privacy and security of their data, mitigating risks like IP leakage. Legacy infrastructure is holding this back, with complexity and cost turning the focus away from innovation and towards operations and simply keeping systems running.
As businesses assess their public, private and hybrid cloud needs, they need to make best use of the professional guidance of the channel so they can leverage modern solutions that are AI-ready whilst also improving security and reducing cost and complexity. The future of the enterprise is private: private cloud, private AI, and private data. By helping enterprises rid themselves of siloed legacy infrastructure across compute, storage and networking and moving to a cloud platform, the channel will once again demonstrate the role it plays in being a key enabler not only of technological transformation but business success.
