Hosting the on-site part of that equation on a private cloud will help customers enjoy some of the public cloud’s flexibility and scalability locally. Hosting those private clouds on hyperconverged infrastructure that crams compute, networking, and storage in a single compact chassis will conserve space, funds, and implementation time. That’s one reason combined sales of hyperconverged and converged systems (which leave out the integrated storage) grew 18.4 percent last year, according to Gartner, and will rise another 18.3 percent this year. “It’s efficient,” Khan says of the hyperconverged model specifically.
That said, the long-term trend, especially at the smaller end of the SMB spectrum, is toward migrating everything into a public cloud platform. Indeed, Nethercoat has trouble coming up with reasons for startups to host anything locally these days. “Unless there is some requirement to keep things on-prem, I don’t know why they wouldn’t put everything in the cloud from day one,” she says.
West agrees. Keeping some workloads on-site makes sense for organizations with complex environments that need more time before going all-in on the cloud, he says. “But I’ve seen fairly large organizations abandon any kind of premise or hybrid solution and free themselves of that way of thinking and accelerate far faster than people who’ve gotten into a hybrid environment.”
9. Get Started Now
Khan urges channel pros to start researching their Cloud 2.0 strategy now by speaking with peers, meeting with vendors, and attending conferences. “I think that’s how you really broaden your exposure about what’s new,” he says. That process takes time and costs money, but is essential just the same. Cloud 2.0 is headed in every channel pro’s direction whether they’re ready for it or not. “It’s either going to help their business or it’ll kill their business,” Khan says.
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