On-premises hosting vs. public Cloud. Is it time for a third way?

Public Cloud:
Driving innovation by optimising flexibility, scalability, and cost control

Public Cloud's principal advantage is that it allows organisations to deploy and manage new resources on an as-needed basis, without any need for costly and time-consuming deployment processes. This makes it a highly attractive option when agility and flexibility are required, such as anticipated busy periods, when resources must be scaled up and down as quickly as possible.

However, for all its advantages, public Cloud is increasingly showing itself to be unsuitable for certain workloads. In particular, the wholescale migration of certain resource-intensive applications that organisations depend on into public Cloud environments often leads to issues around cost control, as well as a sub-par user experience when bandwidth limitations emerge.

Furthermore, when organisations utilise multiple platforms for different applications, inefficiencies and security risks may be created due to sub-optimal integrations.

On-premises hosting:
For when the highest levels of resilience and availability are critical

Despite the growing adoption of Cloud-first strategies, on-premises hosting shows no signs of going away any time soon. It's not hard to see why. When data residency is a priority - be it for compliance or governance purposes, there is simply no comparable alternative to hosting it on-site.

The performance benefits are also considerable, with WAN latency eliminated, and always-on availability readily achievable. This can be especially beneficial where 'smart' sensors are being utilised to track performance or security in real-time, as we often see in modern retail environments and manufacturing operations, or when the performance and availability of resource-intensive PaaS applications must be optimised.

However, any on-premises deployment will prove inherently complex and costly, which will prove limiting when resources are required on a temporary basis (e.g. the opening of 'pop-up' sites, or the spikes in activity we touched on earlier).

Hyperconverged infrastructure:
A single answer to modern hosting challenges

The challenges of Cloud transformation have led many organisations to explore a hybrid Cloud approach, where public and private Cloud platforms are intelligently integrated to combine the advantages of both.

Hyperconverged infrastructure takes this concept to the next level, combining a world-class hybrid Cloud experience with robust on-premises hosting, in whatever blend best suits an organisation's workflows, budget, and long-term goals. With computing, storage, networking, and management resources consolidated into a single software-defined environment, the performance and availability of VMs, PaaS functions, and containerised workloads can be fully optimised, while maintaining maximum control and visibility of the entire infrastructure.

To ensure this new model delivers the best possible ROI and an exceptional user experience, Exponential-e offers the leading-edge Azure HCI platform as a fully managed service, with dedicated systems, on premises, in a data centre, or at the edge - securely and seamlessly connected to Microsoft Azure for Cloud-based services, monitoring, and management.

If you are keen to explore hyperconverged infrastructure's potential impact on your own workloads do not hesitate to contact us. Our own Cloud specialists are ready to discuss your requirements and work closely with you to establish an IT ecosystem that offers the perfect blend of performance, security, scalability, and cost control.