How and why NZ businesses are moving to the cloud
- 03 March, 2015 04:40
Cloud, in all its forms, remains a trend of top strategic importance to New Zealand organisations across every facet of the business.
So much so that IDC New Zealand's recent Asia Pacific (excl. Japan) Cloud survey reported that 100 percent of Kiwi companies have a cloud budget forecast between now and 2016, with 79 percent using between two and five cloud services already.
Yet only a small percentage (28 percent) of apps within APAC organisations have moved to the cloud. So can we still assume that organisations have fully embraced the cloud?
“Organisations in general have fully embraced the concept of the cloud,” says Matt Miller, Director - Field Systems Engineering A/NZ, F5 Networks.
“The high levels of cloud adoption should come as no surprise, especially when you consider the associated cost benefits, as well as, the flexibility and agility a cloud-based infrastructure offers businesses.
“What we are observing is that for years the IT industry has been known to encourage businesses to move technology into the cloud, replacing, and in many cases replicating, existing physical data centres with a cloud-based equivalent.”
Speaking exclusively to Reseller News, Miller says there has however been less focus on efficiency, which can leave some enterprises with operating expenses (OPEX) bills as big, or bigger, than the capital expenses (CAPEX) that they are trying to eliminate.
Consequently in the year ahead, Miller expects to see “increased interest” in cloud optimisation and more enterprises adopting a “Cloud-First” strategy in many business-technology decisions.
“In New Zealand in particular,” he predicts, “we can anticipate rapid and opportunistic adoption of exciting and powerful new technologies and business models that leap frog generations and drive innovation.”
From a F5 Networks perspective, as specialists in Application Delivery Networking technology, the last twelve months has seen “significant growth” in cloud migration within the enterprise sector, which is the most prominent part of the company’s cloud offering.
“We are all about elasticity of compute and helping customers successfully transition to the cloud,” Miller adds.
“Our virtual additions and AWS integration allows customers to be more elastic, hence enabling them to migrate workloads to the cloud.”
As more New Zealand businesses start to understand the benefits of operating in the cloud, especially in relation to ROI, Miller believes they starting to explore what areas of their businesses it can best support.
“While some companies are not yet hosting their entire infrastructures in the cloud, we are seeing a very high increase in the number of companies moving their key enterprise applications in the cloud enabling them to offer their increasingly mobile workers, fast and secure access to critical applications remotely,” he adds.
“A lot of New Zealand companies have already started to move services to the cloud and we will continue to see a lot of new services coming aboard in 2015.”
Hybrid Cloud
Representing the best of both worlds, Miller believes New Zealand organisations are tapping into the “scalability and cost-effectiveness” of a public cloud coupled with the security of a private cloud deployment.
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“It’s a trend we’re seeing at F5,” he adds. “Customers want the benefits of externally-provided cloud computing, such as increased scalability and reduced costs, without compromising on security.
“The fear of handing over mission-critical data and applications to a third party is still present, and is also totally understandable.”
For Miller however, it is important to ensure that organisation’s public cloud, whoever it is provided by, is fully integrated with its private cloud.
“Otherwise a business is left with two separate entities and the benefits of running both will be missed,” he explains.
“Integration can help with traffic balancing, for example.”
For Miller, the importance of hybrid is based largely on the reality that organisations are adopting and migrating to all of the varying cloud models, resulting in the need to manage and orchestrate application services and apps across multiple environments and architectures.
Migrating apps to a cloud environment does not alleviate accountability for performance, or security, or availability as services that assist in providing for these critical facets of delivering applications remain.
As a result, Miller says this means that organisations will have to start looking at cloud migration patterns instead of just adoption and how that impacts things like security perimeters and access control and application performance management as organisations continue to move some apps to the cloud.
“There are so many options out there for businesses depending on their size and needs,” he adds. “For example a smaller business may choose to adopt a SaaS model by signing up to Salesforce and that’s really ‘cloudifying’ their environment.
“However, that may not work for all organisations, such as the likes of a multi-national bank.
“From a bank’s perspective, it is about adopting and having a strategy around hybrid cloud and making sure that they have a good mix between public and private and on-premise as well.
“So it depends on the size of the organisation, their strategy and what is most meaningful to them for the best outcome of the business.”
But as enterprises increasingly move apps across to the cloud in New Zealand, does this mean greater importance is given to application performance?
“Application performance is driving the need for cloud and it’s an absolutely mandatory part of cloud adoption,” Miller adds.
“The consumption of applications drives the cloud and has become more important than the network itself, which is considered more as a delivery mechanism.
“Continued migration of applications to the cloud, combined with increased mobility is causing the dissolution of the traditional enterprise perimeter.
“This in turn forces customers to deliver application services across multiple architectures using a variety of management systems. Hence greater importance is given to application performance.”
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Cloud Movement
In the eyes of Miller, there is “no better time” for service providers in particular to be part of the cloud movement.
What that means, he explains, is that service providers will have to start looking at cloud migration patterns instead of just adoption and how that impacts things such as security perimeters, access control and application performance management as they continue to move some apps to the cloud, keep some at home, and go SaaS for others.
“But the beauty of the cloud is that we no longer have fortress models of security in the form of firewalls within data centres,” adds Miller, when describing the security implications of migrating apps to the cloud without compromising on security.
“Our customers are also starting to realise that the point of security control must be at the application level because as we move up the stack, we are getting away from the obstruction layer and are bringing security into the application layer itself.
“With the emergence of software defined networking, those boundaries have evaporated. Hence, the priority now is to implement security within the application itself to ensure that there are adequate levels of encryption.”
Auckland Support
Seven months after the launch of its Global Support Centre in Auckland, Miller says F5 continues to see demand for its Application Delivery Networking solutions and services, cloud and strong partner ecosystem across the region.
Witnessing “substantial growth” in its talent pool since its opening, due to the high demand of services, the company has more doubled its staff pool to 160 percent in the span of seven months, with plans to further increase that number by the end of 2015.
“From a business perspective, our main priority is to stay online for our customers, and ensure that they have access to technical support 24x7,” Miller adds.
“Data from our support centre shows that 60 percent of time is spent supporting our customers in A/NZ, while the remaining is rendered to those in APAC and US.
“It gives us great pride to be able to support our growing customer base wherever they are in the world.”
NZ Plans
Looking ahead to the rest of 2015, Miller says security and cloud will continue to be a core focus for F5 Networks in New Zealand and will drive its broader growth strategy.
“Together with our cloud service providers, F5 is in a good position to take new solutions to market, based on our heritage and our unparalleled understanding of applications,” he adds.
“We’re application agnostic – we treat all apps the same and have solutions for all types of applications.
“New Zealand is an extremely important location for F5 globally. The significance of the support centre for the A/NZ market highlights Auckland as a strategic business and innovation hub for the APAC region, as well as the opportunities F5’s investment is creating for the local economy.”
In addition to the company’s customer portfolio, Miller says F5 has also witnessed “rapid demand” for application delivery solutions in New Zealand.
“We will continue to invest in and add additional resource to our operations in the country,” he adds. “The expanded team further highlights our ongoing commitment to the region.
“While F5 already has a strong presence in the telecommunications, financial services, government and enterprises, with our expanded team, we hope to also continue to increase our footprint in other vertical industries to include retail as well.”