Don’t know where to start? Don’t know how to start? Below are five(5) initial use cases to understand how and why the public cloud will drive down costs (not just capital, but operational as well) while simplifying IT Operations in your organization.

 

  1. Backup/Archival
    Do you have multiple sites around the nation or the globe? Or maybe you have just two datacenters hundreds or thousands of miles apart and struggle to cross-replicate your data for backup reasons. Use the public cloud infrastructure with data centers around the globe, in hundreds of cities to backup your data.Running out of space? It is extremely cheap to archive data into the public cloud. At the time of writing this, AWS’ Glacier is .004/gb. That’s approximately $4/TB per month. That in enterprise terms is $4000/mth for a PETABYTE or around $50k/year. A petabyte of
    useable (not raw) storage last I checked was $500K+.
  2. Disaster Recovery (DR)
    Backup is a great use case, but when you need a restore a backup, you’re going to have to pull that data over your public pipe, or maybe even a direct connect/express route and that will cost money and take some time. Still VERY worth it, but something to consider is that ability to not only backup to the public cloud, but also use OOTB software that will take your VMware .VMDK files and convert them to AWS .AMI format to be used in EC2, or the same in Azure (.VHDs). Yes, there will be some minor changes (networking, etc.) but after a few runs of a documented DR procedure and with the features the OOTB software provides this is a great DR solution.
  3. Static webpage
    Have a webpage? Chances are your homepage is pretty static(index.html, usually) with features and applications that redirect the user to an application to search for a branch location, or log in to an e-service.What about promotional type programs? Maybe giveaways during a really AWESOME Bowl football game (can’t use that “Sue-per” word), where millions of people will hammer a website to enter their phone number or email address to enter for a prize? Seems like a lot of work to set up MANY servers to handle that traffic for just a day or two.Check out AWS S3 to handle this for you. Totally scalable without any management overhead and from your static S3 webpage you can forward them to your main site if needed.
  4. Innovation
    Big Data? IoT? Machine Learning (Big Data)? All of these are use cases to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in both hardware and software to run said “new” application or process. Usually, the driver for this is to prove out a new use case which will hopefully prove out to be successful. Assuming that it was successful, not only will you have to spec, order and then rack/stack all of the new hardware, but you (your operational teams) will need to onboard a new application and learn how to adapt that to your new use case.
    The public cloud has OOTB services that would otherwise take days or weeks to just set up in your data center.EMR, for example, is a version of Hadoop, but offered as a PaaS service ready to be consumed. AzureSQL is a SQL PaaS offering. Not ready for full SQL PaaS, Azure now has (In Preview) SQL MI (Managed Instances) where you don’t have to worry about patching, monitoring, maintenance, etc., just worry about your data.
  5. Dev/Test Workloads
    A usual concern over the public cloud is security or more specifically, our data being somewhere other than in our datacenter.Dev/Test workloads (with small sets or obfuscated Production working sets) are a great place to start using a CI/CD tool to spin up IaaS or PaaS services, deploy your application, run your unit test and then spin down the services. Rinse and Repeat. This will drive innovation to an extent, as it will give your developers access to services (usually) much faster than the same services in your data center as well as give everyone that warm and fuzzy that the public cloud, when architected in a responsible manner is a safe place for your data to live.

 

These are just five of the many of initial use cases for the public cloud. The first step to do any of these is to setup a proper foundation (networking, IAM, account structure, etc.) and after that, the rest is a breeze.