Digital Services Global Customer Unit e& and Pakistan
Digital Services Global Customer Unit e& and Pakistan
Digital Services Global Customer Unit e& and Pakistan
There are multiple drivers when formulating an enterprise cloud strategy. It is the strategic choices an organization takes that will drive the success and business impact of their cloud journey.
At Ericsson, we believe our customers should be free to choose the most adequate strategy for their infrastructure, which is why we frequently work on different products roadmaps to support a multitude of hybrid multi-cloud strategy approaches.
A hybrid multi-cloud strategy is typically defined by four dimensions: on-premises and in public cloud, the selected public cloud providers, the kind of services consumed (infrastructure, containers, platform, code, software as a service), and the existing ecosystem and data relations our strategic choices pivot around. External factors such as the data residency rules and regulations, latency requirements, availability and footprint of the selected partners and players play a huge role in the strategy.
With time to market being one of the key drivers for moving into cloud, it is important organizations consider the kind of workloads they will place on-premises versus in the public cloud, the level of automation achieved on-premises, and the efficiency of the automation pipeline compared to how easy it is for a user (either technical or business user) to access that infrastructure.
Public cloud is an economy of scale business, adequately demonstrated by the consecutive price drops we’ve seen lately in some of the main players. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) consideration between on-premises and public cloud for these players is driven by the critical mass achieved when migrating workloads to public cloud along with the number of cost drivers that can be reduced on-premises to avoid duplication of costs. With the pay-per-use model in a public cloud environment having embedded costs such as physical space, physical security and cooling, a mass migration will enable players to achieve critical mass and decrease on-premises data center footprint with its associated costs.
When it comes to the kind of services consumed, we will need to take the strategic choice on how much to invest versus how much to leverage from the innovation of others. Last year alone, the main hyperscale cloud providers launched more than 2000 new services and features. Leveraging on current infrastructure and making it efficient through proper automation, having an internal Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or including certain layers such as Containers as a Services (CaaS) can be of benefit for an amortized infrastructure. However, the cost of developing, maintaining, and evolving Platform as a Service (PaaS) services such as Big Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) comes with high cost and therefore must be carefully balanced between time, cost, and benefit vs ready to use PaaS in public cloud.
It is in this domain of PaaS where we find stark differences between public cloud providers. The global presence and availability of services, deployed infrastructure, regional prices, and the brownfield ecosystem are the influential factors that inform the strategic decisions of selecting a specific public cloud provider. Along these lines, Ericsson works with the industry’s main players in the different domains and help facilitate the decision of organizations to avoid vendor lock-in.
When talking about hybrid multi-cloud strategy, it is important we connect data and cloud strategy. Data has gravity – factors like the location, size and usage of data influences the decision to move the data or move the workload closer to the data. In both cases, edge computing will be an essential enabler that will help decide which data to progress. It will also provide computing capabilities and associated services to progress the data to the data lakes, discard, classify, process, or even store it.
At the same time, we have green field deployments in rare cases. Egress cost from public cloud providers is a considerable amount of the TCO [1]. These two facts combined lead to a situation where we need to analyze which systems will interconnect, and most important where those systems already are. This will help organizations understand if the location is convenient to store or whether they should create a new system in a different public cloud provider without moving the existing systems.
As we have seen, there is a multitude of factors organizations must account for in their cloud strategy to fully realize the digitally transformative value of cloud technologies and from Ericsson we are willing to support on the decision-making process.
[1] https://www.fivetran.com/blog/data-egress-cost-analysis
Feb 02, 2022
Edge computing, Research
Sep 17, 2022
Private Networks, Industry 4.0, Digital transformation
Sep 23, 2022
5G, Network Services, AI and machine learning
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