Is there a 'sweet spot' between public and private cloud?
Coreix thinks so, and it will talk about it at our Cloud and Infrastructure Summit
As the concept of cloud continues being driven down everybody's throats, enterprises are feeling continually pressured to get as involved in cloud as possible, and gain as many of the supposed benefits as they can.
But no use case is the same, and particular consideration has to come from those with legacy infrastructures they would much sooner maintain, whether for cost, business continuity, or both.
A company offering such a service is managed server and dedicated hosting firm Coreix, which will be speaking about the topic at Computing's upcoming Cloud and Infrastructure Summit 2016, on 22 September in London.
"We're filling a gap in the market between public and private cloud," says Coreix managing director Alan Dean.
"It's about bringing the scalability of a public cloud with the enterprise resilience of private cloud infrastructure."
Dean talks of a "particular pain point" for customers around migrating legacy, and wanting to maintain those horizontal scaling advantages of a public cloud, but with the care, attention and security a private cloud offers. All while not having to cope with the outlay of replacing a legacy infrastructure.
"At this point in time they don't really want to redesign an entire system from the ground up; they want the very elastic, horizontal scaling you get with a public cloud platform," says Dean.
"And that's something you see day in day out. So it's about trying to find a balance between flexibility of public cloud and having that disk array and automatic failover."
Dean talks of conversations with customers in which, typically, a company may be looking to move to the cloud "but with, say, a Microsoft infrastructure - a couple of web servers and bit of load balancing - so when they come to us, they're looking to have infrastructure-as-a-service within a cloud environment where they need to scale up resources in terms of RAM or CPU or disk IOPS, or add on additional web services".
In return, Dean says Coreix is offering "that inbetween - where you can use enterprise technology - flash array on the disk with replication, and backup with management, and everything you'd expect in a private cloud or dedicated server, but on a public basis".
As a cost-saving 'lift and shift' solution, perhaps Coreix is on to something.