Nutanix, IBM hug each other in Power pity party

Re: rednut hat

It's bound to happen. Public cloud. You literally cannot purchase a new software app or platform that has an on prem option, Google Apps, Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, GAE, Force, etc... every app that was created post 2000 runs as a SaaS app and only a SaaS app. Anything created in the future will be SaaS. IaaS has a strong value proposition too. No company starting greenfield today would consider buying an on prem data center... it is all legacy. A matter of when, not if.

In Australia it appears that many disagree on when it makes sense.

Yeah, the electricity example doesn't hold up perfectly to the cloud situation. Basic economics are the real reason for public cloud though -

1) Economies of scale - Generally speaking, when you do things at extremely high volume (like an AWS or Google in cloud), you can do it much less expensively, per unit, than someone making something on a small scale.

2) Comparative advantage through specialized skills - Google, for instance, can afford to hire 700 PhDs to work on security and invent their own everything from an infrastructure perspective so they are not paying a fortune to 100 middle men providers with huge margins. They can invest in automation technologies to make that infrastructure really fast and reliable. Not possible for even a large business in a non tech industry.

3) Cooperative resource use - When you are building on prem, you need to scale to peak (whatever the three year peak is, even if that peak last for a few hours every year or two). When you use public cloud, you are basically cooperatively pooling infrastructure with thousands of other people and businesses and paying for actual utilization.

A better analogy would be teleco. Everyone is, and always has been, in the "network cloud" through some ISP, like AT&T, Verizon, Orange, etc. No one is dragging their own fiber around the world. Same reasons people use AT&T or whoever as their ISP and teleco provider apply to cloud computing... it's just that people are used to teleco "cloud" because it is the way things have always worked, whereas using it for compute and storage seems different... but not really. If network connections were fast and reliable in the 70s and 80s, no one would have ever built a data center in the first place.... and the question "will this be on prem or in the cloud?" would be as odd a question as "do you plan to use a teleco to connect your New York and London offices, or will you be having a submarine drag a fiber optic cable across the Atlantic ocean?"

"they want to keep their data inhouse, keep their hands on....imagine having a phone number...please stay in the line....and your trucks are piling up...hey, you will need a pint or two in the evening."

Isn't that kind of exactly the way it works on prem? If you have some unknown issue with your, for instance, EMC storage array... or some unknown issue with any aspect in on prem infrastructure, you're on the phone with EMC or whoever trying to figure out what is going on. The difference with public cloud is that instead of having to place calls to EMC, Cisco, VMware, Oracle, SAP, Red Hat, etc (up the entire stack to figure out where the issue is) when you have an issue, you have a single provider or at least fewer... and, in theory, as they control everything there should be far fewer issues and those issues should be fixed fast. None of this "your EMC storage array looks good according to our log data and diagnostics... why don't you call Cisco, this is probably a Cisco thing... or maybe not, who knows... but it's not an EMC problem."

The need to keep data in house is generally an excuse by people who just don't want to change anything. There is no reason for it in most situations. A cloud provider is likely to have more security, data governance resources than the average company, or even above average company. They have huge incentives to not allow that data to be exposed, loss of reputation for their entire company, lawsuits, etc.... Most people are already putting their most critical data out on the cloud, generally via Salesforce... that's every customer name and contact, the entire sales pipeline, your price points for everything, product plans, potentially PCI data and orders. That is the most critical data for most companies... and the data which would be most interesting to hackers.