6 cloud sourcing archetypes

May 1, 2015 Off By David
Object Storage

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Stanton Jones.

What does a typical enterprise cloud services buyer look like? It’s a tricky question to answer. Cloud services are everywhere: in the data center, in development teams, in shared services organizations on manufacturing floors. It’s also delivered in many different ways: as software, as infrastructure that behaves like software and as business processes supported by cloud software. Complicating matters further, what one buyer may call cloud another may call a rack of dedicated, virtualized servers, making the line of demarcation between “cloud” and “traditional” very blurry.

Regardless how one chooses to define this boundary, cloud is permeating just about every corner of the enterprise, and the buyers that are driving this transformation are as varied as the functions they represent. However, buying “archetypes” are starting to emerge. Here are six of the most common:…

1. “Burst to avoid capex”: This buyer has decided to retain a large portion of its organization’s data center services in-house and often has a substantial investment in an on-premises, high-performance grid or a private cloud. However, this buyer is increasingly interested in the idea of using the public cloud — usually Amazon Web Services — as a place to burst into when it needs excess capacity, often only for a few days a month. Financial services companies are increasingly attracted to this model. The primary challenges this buyer faces are around data segregation and security, building a utilization-based business case and the technology complexity inherent in spreading a workload across two disparate technology environments…

Read more from the source @ http://www.computerworld.com/article/2915906/cloud-computing/6-cloud-sourcing-archetypes.html