We all know the huge impact the big 3 public cloud players - Amazon, Google and Microsoft - are having on how IT services are delivered to organizations of all sizes. There are still private clouds in use too; you can have a private cloud on-premises in your own datacenter, or you can have a service provider handle your private cloud for you. Either way, by definition a private cloud is on a private network and that infrastructure is dedicated to your organization. So with public clouds going mainstream, when would you use a private cloud and are there any advantages in doing so? Can the private cloud keep up with the public cloud providers to provide the kinds of services, security and scale you need? Let's take a look at cloud evolution and the considerations for the future.

Public Cloud Gen1 (2006)

The benefits of the first generation public clouds were elasticity and self-service. Developers could spin up a new application by themselves, quickly, and with very little expense on the public cloud. If the application drew more demand, they could scale up the service automatically. The first set of workloads developed for the public cloud were consumer applications such as Netflix and Dropbox.

Planet-Scale Power to the People

Most information technology infrastructure products - databases, server virtualization, file servers, VDI, storage, servers, application servers, and many others - built over the last few decades were built and optimized for deployment in a single data center. In some cases, IT teams got creative and were able to extend these solutions to 2-3 data centers by using complex replication methodologies, which often created unintended consequences and added layers of complexity, and therefore cost to manage it all.

There's no doubt that Workspot's cloud-native technology innovation in the VDI space is disruptive, but equally powerful for our customers is how we have defined ourselves by our innovative Customer Success Program. It's deeply embedded in our core values, because if our customers aren't happy, nothing else matters. But what does success look like to our customers?

One of the meetings I had this week with a company inquiring about Workspot inspired this blog, because there must be plenty of IT leaders out there thinking in the same way as the folks I spoke with. Although this company knows they need to move to the cloud, they are in a situation where they need to depreciate their data center and desktop investments. Of course, that’s the financially responsible thing to do. Some of you can probably relate to this, and you may feel, as these IT leaders did, that they have to wait to make their cloud move, both from a financial and a planning standpoint. The difficulty is that in the meantime, if you have a single data center, you face several challenges that if addressed, could save your business (in the event of a disaster), and can completely transform your business to be ready for high growth. Neither of those are things you want to wait for, and with Workspot, you don’t have to.