Providing choice is the trend. Many years ago I worked at a large telecommunications company. The time, effort, and money spent on just turning up simple point to point connections, yet very important, were time consuming and ultimately frustrating. After a very long day, I went to the vending machine with some colleagues, put money in and my drink came out. I announced at that moment “whatever company can make computing as easy as buying this pop wins”. That announcement, however remedial it may sound is the trend in not only hybrid cloud, but computing in general.
Many of the tools available in the market today; cloud brokering, service catalogs, container technologies, automation, are addressing the need to provide and deliver choice, which is what the market desires.
When we meet as a team to discuss what cloud services we will offer our clients, the answer inevitably becomes, “as much as we can”! But then comes along all the details around providing choice for our clients. Governance, security, monitoring, management, network, cost fluctuations, service lifecycle, ultimately control of the environment are the questions faced by Unisys and our clients. If you look on a grand scale we’ve never had so much “compute” to play with. One Microsoft Azure datacenter can scale to over 500,000 servers. There are 19 Azure datacenters globally. Add Amazon, Google and we are looking at almost infinite scalability.
How we deliver and manage these services must be aligned with the choices our clients make. Meaning a financial institution ordering compute services to support a mission critical application will have a much different governance, security, and management profile than a client ordering temporary Test/Dev infrastructure in the public cloud.
That’s common sense. But it does speak to fact that offering choice has a ripple affect across the delivery organization. Unisys is known for delivering and managing mission critical applications. We run both our own brick and mortar datacenters and client owned datacenters around the world. Mission critical is our starting point. A few years ago we began, in earnest, developing and testing applications in the public cloud. The adoption amongst the Unisys architect community and product teams was explosive. Within 6 months the number of virtual machines running in the public cloud grew 2,000%! Internally we provided choice, we quickly turned out credentials so our architects could start building within hours. Yes public cloud is the vending machine I mentioned earlier.
Our clients have the choice of leveraging public cloud for certain deployments and also private cloud, with a variety of machine sizes, OS types, and security profiles. We know mission critical computing and have governance policies to support delivery and management of these applications. The exciting aspect of hybrid cloud is marrying delivery models across the environment to support both mission critical and non-mission critical compute requirements. We provide choice to our clients and will continue to work on delivering and managing with speed, security, and client satisfaction in mind.
