“Cloud has won.” That was the advice we received from our CIOs panel, which helped us prepare the questions for this year’s CIO Census Report. This knowledgeable and well-informed group declared that cloud is the de facto dominant architecture for business solutions. The question that needs to be answered now is not “should we put this in the cloud,” but “why not put it in the cloud.”
Given this attitude, we were somewhat surprised when ITWC Research conducted a survey of more than 100 companies that reported that only 20 percent of their infrastructure was operated with what we call GAWZ hyperscalers Google, AWS, Azure.
Our study, “What’s Driving Cloud Decisions in Canada Now,” found that a significant proportion of enterprise systems, primarily legacy systems, are still operating on company premises or in dedicated hosting facilities. Costs, complexity, and the perceived benefits of refactoring or rewriting these applications to truly use cloud architectures are unjustifiable.
Businesses have learned that a “lift and shift” of an older architecture to a hyperscale cloud can lead to significantly higher costs. “I think a lot of people are putting something new into the cloud, but if you have something on the ground, I don’t think there’s any business justification for moving – until you have to move,” explained one of the CIOs surveyed in this report.
So how can companies take advantage of the cloud for their legacy applications? One solution that aims to offer some of the benefits of the cloud without requiring significant new development is the idea of the bare metal cloud.
Bare Metal Cloud is a form of Infrastructure as a Service IaaS. In this model, dedicated servers are owned and operated by a remote provider and rented to their clients. Although it is powered by virtualized services, it differs from other cloud-based solutions in that it is single tenancy – it does not share hardware resources with other clients. Bare Metal Cloud Services try to give the best of both worlds, with the security and control of dedicated servers with the flexibility and agility of cloud architectures.
Our research has clearly identified three major advantages of bare metal cloud over premises or simple hosted services: 82 percent of respondents said that bare metal cloud allowed them to focus less on infrastructure and more on business needs; without the constraints of owning hardware, it allowed companies to access the latest infrastructure; and last but not least, there was a clear perception that bare metal cloud could provide more security. This last point was significant, as our research found that 69 percent of respondents said they expect their cloud provider to provide a higher level of network security than their organization can. “
In the same way that the hyperscale cloud is becoming more and more popular with companies, as providers are now more eager to comply with data sovereignty, bare metal cloud, with its dedicated servers, ensures the ability to keep data within the borders of Canada or any other legal system that requires data-sovereign solutions.
Another advantage of bare metal cloud is the absolute control a company has over the underlying server structure. As servers are virtualized in bare metal cloud, the underlying physical server components can be selected to optimize for specific workloads. If you buy a bare metal cloud, you can specify details such as the number and types of cores on the underlying server, allowing you to optimize your applications and workloads for everything from software development to business applications.
ITWC’s research report “What’s driving cloud decisions in Canada now?” considers the bare metal cloud to be a practical and advantageous cloud architecture. You can download the full report here