Blog / The NEW Cloud

For most of us, this is hardly important news, as most of our client’s current servers do not take that much room. Nor are a handful of servers that difficult to manage. But for people who play in the server big leagues, this may be a game-changer.

System architects who work for the big cloud providers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft spend a lot of time calculating compute and storage density.  Think of it as servers per cubic foot. To support their millions of clients, they have acres of servers scattered throughout the world. It has cost them many many millions to build and maintain this infrastructure. A lot has been invested in building this business model to a point where it’s difficult for smaller organizations to break into the cloud hosting business on a large scale. It’s also difficult and expensive for the large players to change.

For the past 2 years, we’ve been told by industry insiders that the days of the large cloud providers may be numbered, but we couldn’t see how that was possible. Intel’s release of this new technology paves the way.

Very shortly, there will be smaller boutique cloud providers that can provide hosting that will be price-competitive with large providers while offering specialized services that add value for the user. For example, a boutique cloud provider could partner with several software  vendors who sell municipal solutions (accounting, GIS, facility maintenance, and so on). The cloud environments could be preconfigured to integrate these solutions. The deployment time could be cut to a fraction.

There are two important ramifications for smaller clients:

1. Moving to the cloud will become easier in the coming years as more options for cloud hosting become available.  But any cloud service needs fast and reliable Internet.  That means investing in Internet services to increase speed and capacity.  Dual (redundant) Internet connections may soon become the standard.
2. Typical cloud providers currently offer incentives to adopt their systems for the long term.  They provide discounts for extended length contracts, or have some proprietary method of formatting your data or applications that makes it difficult to migrate away from them. It would be advisable to keep contract terms short and understand how your data can be moved to another provider.

The big cloud players will counter with different options for cloud hosting to retain their client base.  Microsoft are already providing different options for their Azure hosting platform by extending it to onsite hardware – a hybrid cloud environment whereby they install local Azurehardware (from Dell) that automatically connects to their Azure cloud hosts.

For those of you who are headed into budget planning for 2018 and beyond, it might be worthwhile to do some strategic planning for the future.  Please feel free to contact me or your Account Manager at Trinus if you’d like to learn more about the future of cloud hosting.

Thanks