V3 Summit: Why choose private cloud? Because public cloud is often too expensive - Coreix

Regulation, security and data protection need to be weighed up in public-private cloud switch, says Coreix's Paul Davies

Migrating applications to a private cloud might sound like a lot of work for what is ultimately a re-architecting of internal platforms, but there are many reasons why organisations do it, according to Coreix technical director Paul Davies.

Davies said during the first panel debate at the V3 Cloud & Infrastructure Summit 2016 that the adoption of a private cloud by some organisations is a "strange" decision as it means keeping infrastructure in-house and not realising many of the benefits of cloud.

However, he added that there are a number of good reasons for many organisations to do so. "Not everybody is comfortable putting [their hardware] into co-location facilities. So they take advantage of cloud architectures and put them in their data centres to try to gain some benefit [from cloud computing technologies]," said Davies.

Coreix had seen a move towards hybrid and private cloud solutions in many organisations. "They are taking note of some of the limits of public cloud, and when and when not to use it," he said.

"They are obviously aware of data security, data sovereignty and performance because there are certainly things that you just can't do in the cloud at this time."

Indeed, research among CIOs and other senior decision makers conducted for the V3 Summit by V3 sister title Computing indicated that data sovereignty and compliance are the main reasons why organisations are reticent to go fully public cloud. Some 63 per cent of respondents cited this as a barrier to adoption, while 60 per cent cited security concerns.

Email and collaboration tools, suggested Davies, are ideal areas to start experimenting with cloud because collaboration will invariably require the use of the public internet. Backing up data to the cloud, meanwhile, may make sense for some organisations but there will be compliance issues for others, he warned.

"It depends on the business in question. So, while they are a great way to advocate for cloud solutions, it still comes down to context and data sovereignty, data protection, compliance and performance because certain applications and certain companies just cannot put things into the cloud," he said.

"It can work out much more expensive in this perspective. Instead, such organisations opt for the hybrid cloud solution. It's always going to be based on the context of the business."

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