Is there any hope for efficiency in the cloud? Tony Palmer says yes…it’s just a matter of knowing where to look.
Palmer is a principal validation analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group [esg-global.com] (ESG, a division of TechTarget), a technology consulting group based in Newton, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb. One of ESG’s specialties is validating the effectiveness of popular enterprise technologies and publishing in-depth reports on the company’s findings.
“A technical validation has elements of testing to see whether a product or solution works as advertised,” Palmer said in an interview with The Forecast by Nutanix.
Palmer noted that validation goes beyond documenting performance of hardware and software: It must demonstrate the Business value of a technology solution.
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Validating the business case for the cloud has become a popular pastime of technology analysts. There’s no question that the cloud delivers agility, speed and scale. But what about cloud efficiency? That’s a much taller obstacle because cloud costs typically rise in tandem with cloud consumption.
This quandary inspired an influential article published by Andreesen-Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm, in 2021. The article noted that as enterprise cloud deployments expand, businesses’ costs explode , shaving billions off their market capitalization and diverting money that might be better spent on more pressing concerns like expanding market share or transforming the customer experience.
As a validator of technology products — particularly cloud offerings — Palmer has a front-row seat in businesses’ embrace of cloud technologies.
“Maturation is rapidly accelerating,” he said. “It's a viable place for your business to live.”
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ESG’s market research supports this thesis. Nine out of 10 companies ESG surveyed were digitally transforming their businesses.
“Eighty percent said they have applications and workloads that are strong candidates to move to the public cloud over the next five years,” Palmer added.
Many of these cloud adopters will face sticker shock when the full cost of renting space in the cloud at scale becomes clear. Moreover, they’ll soon discover the complications of repatriating workloads to on-prem data centers, even if on-prem costs less.
At the same time, they want to preserve the speed-and-scale advantages of the cloud. The savvy response is to optimize — scanning for efficiencies that make cloud expenses manageable.
The Economic Advantages of virtualization and Automation
One path to cloud efficiency emerged in a technical validation Palmer and co-author Kerry Dolan conducted in 2021. They took a deep dive into the performance of Nutanix Cloud Platform , which uses virtualization, automation and intuitive dashboards to simplify cloud management.
Nutanix pioneered software to emulate the conventional three-tiered data center (compute, storage and networking) with what’s called hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) . HCI allows IT admins to spin up a computing environment in a fraction of the time required with previous generations of technology.
The result: “A business that needs to deploy a new application gets it into production faster,” Palmer said.
How much faster?
Palmer has studied the process in detail. Once company he analyzed was averaging about 38 person-hours week to deploy a cluster in the cloud. Nutanix’s software slashed that time to about an hour.
“It’s really spectacular,” he added, thanks to automation that removes painstaking manual processes.
