Forget Public Cloud: This Private Cloud Innovation is Game-Changing

Considering the next step for your cloud architecture? Clustered private cloud technology offers innovative solutions that deserve your attention.

Cloud adoption is reaching maturity. Recent studies by Flexera and RightScale suggest that 9 in 10 businesses are leveraging cloud computing today in some form. For many CIOs, public cloud solutions haven’t delivered on all their promises, with the main concerns regarding Public Cloud solutions being:

1. Transparency shortfalls of data security and associated safeguards, including concerns over endpoint logging and controls.
2. Challenges of replication and scalability to serve global expansions and the proliferation of apps, digital documents and bots.
3. Unpredictable (and therefore budgetable) long-term costs.
4. Sub-optimal administrative costs to support an ever-growing mesh of cloud apps and portals–heightened by concerns over replicating and scaling solutions to honor compliance requirements.
5. Poor governance and log recording of key data privacy, data security and data asset considerations.

(New to cluster cloud architecture? Our article Why Clustered Private Cloud explains the move from Public to Clustered Private Clouds)

Public cloud scaling can be cumbersome and expensive. At one time, most cloud deployments were SaaS solutions used to solve task-specific shortcomings or automate disciplines such as customer management, people management, project management or manufacturing.

Today, the use of cloud architectures has accelerated, with some organizations operating over 200 discrete cloud applications, generally authored and maintained by third parties on Public Clouds, of which they share their experience with other companies on the same shared hardware infrastructure. This model has been good for software vendors, as it has made software development simpler, platform version control issues less painful, and has dropped the cost of building a software business considerably, leading to more SaaS products and more apps being adopted by organizations.

In the last decade, the computer industry has been getting ever more effective at providing self-service cloud tools and infrastructures. This has led to an acceleration of no-code and low-code self-app authoring, as businesses seek to deliver more value to customers through apps, and more transparent and streamlined services.

The number of user stakeholders for cloud-deployed systems is growing exponentially. Whereas most data entry and data processing used to happen behind the firewall of the enterprise, often with members of staff keying in data from customers and suppliers, the expectation of cloud systems today is that all stakeholders of a system–no matter where they are located, who they work for, or what role they perform, etc.–should have appropriate access to data that can bring them value.

While all this has been happening, software robots have progressively become more useful and cognitive AI has matured to the point it is now being adopted at scale to empower, if not displace, humans as data processing workers.

Consequently, organizations want to reuse data more, share it more, and serve a broader variety of consumers–including apps, interactive digital documents, portals and software bots. This is driving the cloud industry to keep evolving ever better and smarter ways of dealing with the ‘hyper-automation’ of processes and supply chains and the ‘hyper-scaling’ of computing infrastructures.

In a digital age, data is the secret sauce for those seeking competitive advantage. One great benefit of a clustered cloud architecture lies in its mastery over the management and reuse of data.

Encanvas secure private cloud spaces can be easily replicated and scaled. More control is afforded to administrators to know what resourcing demands are being made on each space, so that hardware (IaaS) infrastructure resourcing can be optimized.

When replicating cloud spaces, administrators will dictate what gets replicated. You can copy all aspects of a secure space to completely mirror a deployment, or you can fine-grain your selections of inherited features down to the app logic, data endpoints, plug-ins, users, data elements, etc.

A recent study by Gartner predicts that 70% of businesses will migrate to clustered private cloud solutions by 2027 due to their agility and cost-effectiveness. – Gartner Report: The Rise of Clustered Private Clouds

Public clouds host their tenants on a common-to-all hardware infrastructure and many will share a common database. This makes the customization of platforms more challenging. It also introduces a whole new list of potential data security concerns.

This does not mean of course that Public Cloud systems are inherently unsafe.

Provided vendors take the necessary robust and thoughtful steps to incorporate data security by design into their architectures, there is principally no reason for a system to expose your data to threats. nevertheless, this pre-supposes that those safeguarding measures have been adopted. For many organizations, the sheer cost of performing these checks

In the case of Encanvas Secure Spaces, all user privileges and endpoints to a secure cloud are ringfenced and protected by a series of proprietary data security safeguarding measures we call the Ring-of-Steel.

“Clustered private clouds offer a unique blend of security, control, and scalability that simply can’t be replicated with public cloud solutions.” – Source: VMware Blog: 5 Reasons to Consider a Clustered Private Cloud

If you are not already running a clustered private cloud you’re missing out. With the proliferation of software bots, apps, interactive digital documents and portals, there has to be a more secure, better governed and more predictably simpler to scale answer to cloud architecture than constantly iterating vendor agreements and ‘making do.’

Clustered cloud architectures like Encanvas Secure Spaces are:

• Easier to learn and use – because everything is configured in a no-code (and no scripting) desktop cockpit
• Faster to deploy and scale
• Inherently better at managing data, affording more control over how data is organized and used
• Safer for data thanks to a host of proprietary safeguards we call Ring-of-Steel
• Richer in data logs and analytics
• Cheaper to buy and run, guaranteeing no upgrades or scaling costs ever

In summary, a clustered cloud architecture offers a refreshingly complete and sustainable solution to cloud deployments of the armies of software bots being fashioned in the backrooms of tech companies everywhere. Who knows, in pursuit of a single integrated ‘common to all’ data and systems environment’ we might one day get to the stage where businesses will run their own clustered clouds on third-party hosted environments and say to the software vendors they work with ‘Hey, no problem – use our cloud.’

“Legacy cloud solutions are simply not keeping pace with today’s data demands. Clustered private clouds offer a future-proof architecture that scales with your business.” – Forbes Technology Council (Source: Forbes Article: Why Clustered Private Clouds Are the Next Big Thing: link to article)

Many of us remember that the enterprise cloud really kicked off back in 2014-15, now a decade ago. Despite the progress, the full potential of cloud technology is still unfolding. Today, we’re grappling with complex concepts like serverless computing, containerization, and hybrid cloud architectures. The sheer pace of innovation means the “cloud” we envisioned a decade ago is just the tip of the iceberg. 

Gartner predicts that by 2027, 50% of critical enterprise applications will be deployed outside of centralized public cloud locations, arguing that businesses are starting to “seek placement for workloads that have not migrated to the public cloud, representing approximately 70% of all workloads.”

Public Cloud has proven to be a winner in the B2C space but, for organizations that need greater self-determination, data governance and technical authority, we are seeing signs of a new dawn.

Get in touch to learn more.