What's the last piece of corporate infrastructure that gets moved to the cloud? For many organizations databases represent the final frontier, with fears over security and a potential loss of control often standing in the way.
Gartner recently calculated that revenue from the managed cloud database platform-as-a-service (DBaaS) segment accounted for 49 per cent of the entire database market in 2021 however, suggesting that reticence is evaporating.
Elsewhere, the Cloud Industry Forum reports that security is no longer the biggest inhibitor to cloud adoption, with budget and legacy integration becoming the more major issues. The research also showed that sustainability is an increasing concern for customers, though cost, breadth of service, trust and scale were the key priorities when it came to choosing a cloud supplier.
The fact is few companies are going to trust their data to the cloud unless they've thought long and hard about it, says Hiren Parekh, vice president for Northern Europe at OVHcloud, one of Europe's largest cloud providers with ambitions to add 80 PaaS solutions to its portfolio in the future.
However, he says, it may be that as they move into the journey, they're experiencing "bill shock" and "thinking, well, the numbers aren't adding up the way I thought. The cost savings that we built into our business case aren't materializing."
And while it's easy to move into the cloud, it can be harder to move out of one provider's cloud and into another cloud. This is why OVHcloud thinks the conversation around cloud in general, and cloud databases in particular, needs to center as much on promoting interoperability and eliminating vendor lock-in as it does on technology.
OVHcloud began as an Internet hosting provider, founded in 1999 by current chairman Octave Klaba. From the beginning, it focused on developing technology to cool in its data centers as a means to meet internal sustainability and carbon reduction targets. That led to the company developing its own water-cooling system which requires 1 glass of water for 10 hours of operation per server – whereas the industry average is 10x more, according to Parekh.
The company now operates 400,000 servers in 33 data centers on four continents, with a maximum Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.1 underpinned by a 32 terabit a second network with built in DDoS protection: "What we've ended up with is a comprehensive set of cloud services across our Public, Hosted Private, Bare Metal and Web Cloud services, which now support over 1.6 million customers in 40+ countries."
That go it alone approach to cooling technology is mirrored by OVHcloud's philosophy around openness and transparency. Founder Klaba made a commitment that "We'd be a facilitator and enabler for business, as opposed to adopting the typical business model of hyperscalers which locks people in and makes a buck from a captive organisation."
Could the cloud be any cooler?
That commitment has become increasingly important in parallel with the growing importance of digital sovereignty, particularly when it comes to data. Parekh says OVHcloud's approach has three main elements.
The most obvious is data sovereignty, which is rapidly becoming a boardroom topic, not least because of broader geopolitical issues. While the US hyperscalers have been readily embraced by UK buyers in the last decade, he continues, "there are other countries in Europe that are a more hesitant to use them."
That reluctance has been exacerbated by the US government's 2018 Clarifying Overseas Use of Data Act (Cloud) act which gives Washington scope to compel US cloud providers to hand over customer data, even if it is held outside the US. So, while US-based operators may describe themselves as GDPR compliant, ultimately their obligations under the Cloud Act will trump their local requirements in other countries of the world.
By contrast, points out Parekh, OVHcloud is European. "GDPR is what drives us.
