When early cloud adopters bought into massive, on-demand scale, they also assumed the responsibility of managing failure-prone commodity hardware. They had to adapt their applications to run in the cloud in addition to monitoring a complex new system. While curing some IT headaches, the public cloud created new ones, like:
- Unreliability – Cheap, failure-prone commodity hardware creating a requirement to overprovision cloud resources to plan for server failure.
- Management – Attaining experienced cloud engineers to tweak and tune cloud resources, handle monitoring and alert response, and manage the applications and workloads running on top of cloud resources.
- Cloud sprawl: To get the additional services needed to run workloads, secure deployments and other cloud-related tasks, businesses needed multiple providers leading to shadow IT, platform lock-in, billing confusion, and service compatibility glitches.
The DIY nature of public cloud didn’t work for everybody. Some organizations wanted the speed-to-launch and flexibility of on-demand cloud resources, but they also needed round-the-clock support and architecture expertise. As Gartner describes in the Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting North America report, “Cloud-enabled managed hosting brings cloudlike consumption and provisioning attributes to the traditional managed hosting market.” Those early cloud adopters quickly found that managing a cloud can cause as many problems as it solves, but the benefits were too enticing to pass up. To mitigate the risks of the new technology, businesses sought out providers who could not only provide raw infrastructure, but also provide:
- Support and expertise to manage and grow the environment in accordance with business strategy
- Full-stack management that runs the underlying cloud resources and complex workloads, such as databases, ecommerce software, email, and other critical applications
- Shorter lead times to deployment by integrating on-demand resources and the implementation of DevOps automation methods.
Find out how this category change could impact your business and why Rackspace Managed Cloud was positioned the furthest for completeness of vision and ability to execute in the Leaders Quadrant in the North American and European categories.
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Source: www.pcworld.com
