What is Private-Cloud-as-a-Service and What Does It Mean to Digital Transformation?

With the acceleration of cloud and organizations focusing on digital transformation now more than ever, it’s time to consider bringing apps and workloads back to private clouds through as a Service offerings. At Iron Bow’s 2023 Engineering Summit, Steve Smith, Director of Cloud Technologies, shared how private-cloud-as-a-Service can help drive cost effectiveness, performance efficiencies, and tangible outcomes all while enabling true digital transformation.

What is Digital Transformation?

According to Bard AI, digital transformation is the process of using digital technologies to change business processes, products, and services to meet evolving customer expectations. It’s a fundamental change that requires organizations to rethink how they operate and deliver value.

The Shift in the IT Landscape

Many organizations, especially in the public sector have taken a cloud-first approach to accelerate digital transformation efforts. However, they now have multiple cloud and storage services spread across multiple cloud hosting environments.

Not only does this create more data silos but also increased costs and complexities in already complex IT environments.

Moving Back to Private Cloud

According to IBM’s Transformation Index (State of the Cloud 2022) Report, 80% of organizations are moving workloads from public clouds back to some form of private infrastructure. Why? According to this hybrid cloud report:

• Not all applications and workloads are cloud-optimized
• Unplanned increases in reoccurring cost as workloads grow
• Average over-provisioning with 59% for compute and 48% for storage
• Data silos inhibit access to real-time decision making
• The resources and expertise to manage/maintain cloud environments are expensive

Already, 74% of workloads that have already migrated are candidates for modernization. What this means is migrating to the right cloud is a major part of the path towards digital transformation.

How a Hybrid Cloud Strategy Can Help

Complexity continues to increase as organizations (76%) use two or more public clouds, according to 451 Research. Using multiple public clouds can help you benefit from best-of-breed capabilities or handle integration challenges. But this adds more layers of complexity to already complex IT environments, as organizations increasingly rely on a mix of on-prem systems, private clouds, multiple public clouds and legacy platforms.

Iron Bow can help you gain control over your existing applications and environments so you can develop an overarching plan to modernize, implement proper governance and execute on your digital transformation plan.

An effective cloud strategy means that platforms are integrated, and workloads are portable.

What’s the Difference Between a Private Cloud and a Data Center and Why Should You Care?

• On Premise: Legacy physical and virtual data, data silos, limited portability and automation, high touch.
• Public cloud: Start quickly, highly scalable, pay as you go. Proprietary, security challenges, spiraling costs for data egress.
• Private Cloud: Deliver core public cloud capability with more control, improved security, compliance, and performance with predictable cost.

Bottom line: Private cloud solves your digital transformations challenges in a secure and private cloud computing environment.

Why Private Cloud as-a-Service?

Private cloud-as-a-Service can help solve your digital transformation challenges in a secure and private cloud computing environment by leveraging the following benefits:

• Single contract: Consolidate hardware, software, licensing, maintenance, services, and managed services.
• Cloud smart: Be strategic as you prepare for your cloud journey with an optimized on-prem cloud environment that provides the tools to easily deploy applications, quickly build and scale features and services, and keep up with changing user demands.
• Unified operating model: Extend on-premises infrastructure and operations to any public cloud. Use a consistent operating model and a single set of tools across public clouds, data centers and edge environments.
• Easy and intuitive use: Spin up resources on demand. Remove complexity for your organization via a managed service.
• Agility and flexibility: Bring the look, feel, and usability of the cloud on-premises with cost efficiency. Easily modernize and migrate applications on demand.

Ready to try private cloud as a service to drive your digital transformation? Reach out to our technology leaders at CTOteam@ironbow.com.