Why the private cloud is still needed to better utilise the public cloud

James has more than a decade of experience as a tech journalist, writer and editor, and served as Editor in Chief of TechForge Media between 2017 and 2021. James was named as one of the top 20 UK technology influencers by Tyto, and has also been cited by Onalytica, Feedspot and Zsah as an influential cloud computing writer.


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According to the latest research from Pluribus Networks, building private clouds is of “critical importance” to effectively utilising public cloud services.

The research, which polled 134 IT professionals and business decision makers who attended this year’s VMworld, found that there was nothing to split public and private clouds among respondents as technologies which will impact their company the most in the future.

43% said public and private cloud respectively were most likely to impact their company over the next three years, followed by 41% for virtual desktop infrastructure and 30% for converged infrastructure. Yet the research also noted only 14% ‘strongly agreed’ that their IT department was set up to meet the needs of the business, putting doubt over new technologies being used.

One area of investment which is a little less important for today is the network; three times as many respondents say the network is a strategic rather than tactical investment. Yet 42% of respondents are adopting software defined networking (SDN) to meet their application challenges, ahead of converged infrastructure (38%), big data (32%), and containers (30%0.

“It turns out most IT organisations are looking for the roadmap to begin their digital transformation journey, and the discussion about wide-scale adoption of public cloud versus building a private cloud in-house becomes a major part of their investigation,” said Mark Harris, vice president of marketing at Pluribus Networks in a statement.

“As their research progresses, they realise that each of these cloud approaches share one thing in common: they each offer the means to bring new business services online quickly and cost-effectively. They also realise that the hybrid mix of private and public cloud is a function of existing capacity and future needs,” Harris added. “It is a pure business planning process.”

Writing for CIO.com earlier this week, cloud computing influencer Bernard Golden noted that most IT organisations will “in the long run intuit the economic unviability of private clouds” aside from certain scenarios, such as data sovereignty. “On-premises infrastructure will inevitably shrink to a fraction of what is currently installed, with much pain realised by the legacy vendor/on-premises infrastructure staff coalition as this dynamic plays out,” Golden added.

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