At Huawei Cloud Congress Europe 2016 there were a raft of interesting talks, ranging from virtual reality to supercomputers. Whatever technology was being discussed, however, the conversation inevitably came back round to cloud computing and the challenges and opportunities it provides for businesses.
[easy-tweet tweet=”Huawei outlined their three magic words for cloud transformation: Open, Hybrid and Integration”]
It was during one of these talks that Krzysztof Celmer, Senior IT Solution Consultant at Huawei, outlined his “three magic words” for cloud transformation: “Open, Hybrid and Integration.” Below, I’ve taken a look at why these three principles are key for businesses of all sizes and across all industries.
Open
It’s not just Huawei that is singing the praises of open cloud environments. The likes of IBM, Dell and Rackspace have all pledged to support open cloud standards.
It’s easy to see how open cloud platforms benefit the end-user by giving them more choice and greater interoperability, but vendors also stand to benefit. By opening themselves up to greater collaboration, cloud vendors gain access the vast resources provided by opensource communities. Open standards have helped to drive innovation, opening up platforms to new developers, new applications and, ultimately, new ideas.
It’s all well and good having a closed ecosystem if you can convince enough customers that all of your cloud offerings are best in class, but in reality this is difficult for a single vendor to achieve. Open standards turns competitors into collaborators and creates a win-win ecosystem for customers and businesses alike.
Hybrid
Certain applications may be better suited to a public cloud environment and others private. With this in mind, many businesses are moving to a hybrid cloud approach in order to grasp the best of both worlds. Huawei’s FusionCloud offering makes use of OpenStack cascading technology to connect public and private environments. Business must have the upmost confidence in both, in order for their hybrid deployments to be successful.
Hybrid cloud recognises that combining the flexibility and scalability of public cloud with the security of private cloud represents that ideal infrastructure for many organisations. Increasingly, this means blending platforms from multiple vendors, which brings us to the third magic word.
Integration
As the cloud market opens itself up to a wider range of vendors and niche applications, the integration challenge becomes more pressing. What’s more, businesses must ensure that cloud platforms not only work together, but also with their existing on-premise technology. In fact, a recent survey indicated that 81 per cent of respondents think that cloud applications must be fully integrated with each other as well as with on-premises software in order to experience the full rewards of cloud computing.
The integration challenge is also multi-faceted. Businesses must be aware of where their data sets are located in order to meet compliance standards and to generate vital insights. API limitations may also scupper your integration plans and businesses must make sure that they have the expertise to overcome this hurdle. Fortunately, many cloud vendors are now making integration a priority, particularly as competition between vendors intensifies. Some businesses are even offering Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) as a means of delivering additional value to their customers.
[easy-tweet tweet=”Certain applications may be better suited to a public #cloud environment and others private” hashtags=”Hybrid”]
Although there’s no magic formula for cloud computing success, keeping in mind the three key principles of “open, hybrid and integration” will certainly help you when choosing your cloud vendors.