Why are enterprises more skeptical about public cloud these days? Vendors and Wall Street research have both noted the attitude. Why? We just came off a period of record consideration of increased public cloud use, and all the pundits are saying that the future is the cloud. Of course, pundits have lied to us for decades, and sometimes “consideration” identifies as many issues as benefits. Is the cloud losing its luster, and if so, how could we get that luster back, at least to the point of a realistic view of public cloud as an IT option?
According to enterprises, the biggest problem the public cloud has today is overpromotion. One CIO told me that “When we opened our assessment of public cloud computing, we had done our research, or so we thought. What we found was that we knew nothing, and were being fed nonsense.”
Two-thirds of enterprises say that the view of public cloud computing presented in the media is “totally inaccurate”. They say that it’s believed that public cloud will replace the data center, and enterprises are almost unanimous in saying that’s not the case. However, CIOs and IT planners spend a lot of time arguing with line organizations and the CEO/CFO about that point. Senior management’s view of the cloud is largely set by media/analyst material, which the technical people actually doing the planning say is likely to present a universal-cloud vision that simply doesn’t fit reality.
That’s not the end of the overpromotion. The public cloud providers, say enterprises, are rarely satisfied with selling what enterprises really want (and have wanted all along), which is hybrid cloud. The cloud is an elastic front-end element that’s an essential piece of “application modernization” according to the technical staff. What they get from cloud providers is something like “Sure, but when do you think you’ll move the rest of your work to the cloud?”
There shouldn’t be any secret to the fact that enterprises don’t want to get rid of data centers, not for reasons of lack of sophistication or technology skill, but because you can’t make the business case for it. As public cloud providers got more exposure to decision-makers during 2020, their overpromotion drove broader consideration of public cloud, and created more concern among CxOs that the cloud providers were manipulating them. In December of 2019, only 14% of enterprises told me that their public cloud providers were manipulative, pushing unrealistic missions, and trying to lock them in. This, compared with 52% who said that their traditional IT vendors were doing that. In January of 2021, 67% of enterprises thought their cloud providers were manipulative, and only 50% said that of their IT vendors.
This issue may be related to the second point that enterprises raise about the public cloud, which is that the cloud providers aren’t helpful in framing public cloud in hybrid missions from a technical perspective. A CIO put it this way: “We get a lot of advice in how to optimize our applications with cloud features, but not much about how to connect the new front-end piece with our current business applications.” This is likely why more and more enterprises seem to be turning their cloud planning around, starting from the data center and working outward. That, in turn, may be why IT vendors are now getting more respect.
If you don’t have a hybrid mission, of course, you have a data center replacement mission or you forget the cloud completely. Neither of these are realistic options to enterprises. Not only do they not want to replace their data centers, they don’t want to rearchitect or replace their current mission-critical applications either. The front-end mission of the public cloud has been the line of least resistance for the cloud all along, and the line that most cloud providers were pursuing. In 2020, those providers got greedy and unrealistic.
There’s still a problem, though. We saw in 2021 a major uptick in distrust for the public cloud providers. They’re overcharging, they’re locking me in, they don’t have the reliability they claim, they don’t understand my goals…you get the picture. At the same time, we saw only about a 5% decline in distrust for the IT vendors (52% to 50%). Why didn’t the reputation of IT jump as that of the cloud providers fell?
“These guys don’t know anything about each other,” a CIO complained. Sure, the cloud guys were trying to grab all the money, and sure the IT guys were resisting, but IT vendor resistance wasn’t addressing the problem much better than the cloud providers were. Remember, the mission of enterprise IT planners was simple from the start—use public cloud services where they made business sense. That was up front, near the GUI, where increased interest in smartphones as worker appliances and application portals were in demand to support customers and partners. Not in the back end, which is why “hybrid cloud” was the strategy from the first.
It’s still the strategy. Enterprises have broadly declined to move mission-critical applications to the cloud for reasons too numerous to cite here, and in my view, their decision is the right one. What do we do to support it?
Anyone who ever played “whip” as a child knows that the people closest to the point of pivot move less and those on the end move more. The elastic benefits of public cloud services are great for the dynamic edge but not for the core application. The real question, a question neither cloud providers nor IT providers can answer, is where along the path of the whip a particular business would find the optimal transition point between cloud and data center.
We can do elastic deployment in the data center, after all. What we can’t do is distribute it geographically and scale it almost infinitely. That’s OK where we have data center legacy transactional apps doing their thing on a very limited number of places. The elastic elements closest to the handle of our whip don’t need to move far. Further out, we might benefit more from elasticity, so the real focus of hybrid cloud planning should be the portion of the whip somewhere around midway to the tip. How do we decide exactly where, and what technology tools would optimize the coupling between the cloud and data center pieces?
This shouldn’t be rocket science, technology-wise. It might require some realism and discipline from both cloud providers and vendors, and it’s sure going to be difficult to promote something this technological and (if we’re frank) boring to the media/analyst communities. Without some PR, can we popularize the solution, even if we manage to find it? That’s probably the trade-off of our age.
Cloud computing isn’t the only place we have this problem. Edge computing, 5G and private 5G, artificial intelligence and machine learning, IoT…the list goes on…all present the same challenges, the balance between the need to inform buyers of solutions but at the same time support realistic paths to those solutions, however complex and boring they may be. The cloud in 2020 showed us there’s a price to getting it wrong, but there’s still time to get it right, for the cloud and for the other kingpin technologies on the horizon.