As the different types and classes of cloud computing environment continue to expand, many organizations are increasing their reliance on external service providers. This week, Rackspace in collaboration with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced it is now extending the managed private cloud service it provides to instances of OpenStack running in its data centers or in a local IT environment using HPE infrastructure that organizations can pay for like a public cloud service.
Scott Crenshaw, executive vice president for private cloud at Rackspace, says it won’t be long before Rackspace extends the reach of its managed private cloud services to also include instances of VMware, Microsoft Azure Stack and Kubernetes. Organizations of all sizes now want to be able to treat IT as an operational cost without necessarily having to sacrifice the benefits of a single-tenant IT environment, which includes better performance as well as greater security and simpler compliance, says Crenshaw.
“They want a pay-as-you-go model for both on and off premise,” says Crenshaw.
Overall, Crenshaw says, an on-premise instance of OpenStack on average is about 40 percent less expensive than employing an equivalent instance of Amazon Web Services (AWS) over a three-year period. As IT organizations become savvier about cloud computing, many of them are taking a much more strategic conversation about what types of workloads are most appropriate to run in specific cloud environment, says Crenshaw. The result is that multi-cloud computing will soon be a standard element of any enterprise computing environment, adds Crenshaw.
Not every IT organization, however, has the skills or financial wherewithal to stand up a cloud environment on their own. In fact, many of them are increasingly making clear they would rather focus their efforts on applications rather than managing IT infrastructure. It’s not exactly clear to what degree organizations will increase their reliance on managed service providers (MSPs) in the age of the cloud. But given all the complexity associated with managing multiple clouds, it is apparent that many more IT organizations will need help anywhere they can find it.
