While public cloud has enabled many IT teams to turn their focus towards innovation by moving responsibility for infrastructure to external service providers, it remains prohibitive for a large number of enterprise use cases. Reasons for this include the fact that the multi-tenant architecture of public cloud services can introduce costly overheads, along with unpredictable degradation of service quality due to Noisy Neighbour Syndrome.
Doug Rich, VP of EMEA at HyperGrid, said: “By and large, public cloud has been successful because it reduces the burden on IT teams to maintain infrastructure, which is both time- and labour-intensive. This is where private cloud has its shortcomings: these solutions still rely on a do-it-yourself approach, which leaves responsibility for building and scaling infrastructure with internal IT teams.
“To help effectively marry the benefits of both public and private cloud while eliminating their disadvantages, a new model for cloud computing is needed.”
According to HyperGrid, the emergence of True Cloud is set to be instrumental in this endeavour. This model combines the best characteristics of public cloud with the benefits of owning a private data centre. Customers are given physically isolated infrastructure resources that are owned and operated by the cloud provider. Like regular public cloud services, customers pay for the True Cloud they consume, whilst having the ability to easily scale resources beyond their committed capacity. This unites the consumption-based pricing models common to public cloud with the high-performance cloud capacity of private data centre infrastructure, and is an approach through which carrier-neutral providers are starting to see results.
Rich concluded: “Demand for high-performance computing capacity at the edge of the network is expected to rise, owing to the inexorable growth of the Internet of Things, mobile and other edge computing devices. As this shift takes place, the economics and performance characteristics of public cloud services will become undesirable for these use cases. The emergence of True Cloud represents an unprecedented opportunity for carrier-neutral service providers to increase their value to customers in the cloud era.”