Is Public Cloud Cheaper Than Running Your Own Data Center?

By Marco Meinardi in research

This post originally appeared on the Gartner Blog Network.

The question on whether public cloud infrastructure is cheaper than running on-premises data centers keeps coming in client inquiries. Clients realize that most of the answers produced by the industry so far are skewed by the vested interests of whoever is coming up with those answer. Public cloud providers make their offerings look significantly more cost-effective than on-premises data centers. Hardware vendors promote the opposite view. Furthermore, within organizations themselves, internal politics continues to inevitably influence the results of any attempt to produce defensible calculations.

That’s why we decided to take a shot at answering this. I’m proud to announce that my research note “How to Develop a Business Case for the Adoption of Public Cloud IaaS” (paywall) is now available on gartner.com. The research provides guidance on how organizations should go about calculating TCOs and ROIs for their cloud adoption and migration projects. Gartner clients often struggle to quantify the cost savings that the cloud model can lead to as well as the potential for new revenue opportunities. As a results, clients often end up calculating cloud costs with the same buying patterns as they were using in their data centers, missing out on the optimization opportunities that public cloud infrastructure can offer. At the same time, clients struggle to quantify the necessary investments to skill up and operationalize cloud to take full advantage of the technology.

The research states that “cloud services can initially be more expensive than running on-premises data centers. [However, it also proves that] cloud services can become cost-effective over time if organizations learn to use and operate them more efficiently.” The statement is backed by an example of workload migration for 2,500 virtual machines from an on-premises data center to Amazon Web Services EC2. The example TCO (shown in the figure below) shows an initial uptake in cloud costs and a steady decline as soon as organizations learn how to apply cost optimization best practices (as described in this other framework). The chart also shows how on-premises costs may have a long tail as organizations take time to actually shut down their data centers.

While the savings on infrastructure costs over time may look appealing, organizations should bear in mind that the overall ROI may be still negative in the short term due to the hefty investments in transformation and the long tail of on-premises data center costs. Furthermore, the example in Figure 1 is based on a number of assumptions (available in the research for consultation) that will not be representative of all situations. As a consequence, organizations that want to conduct a similar exercise should be prepared to tailor the assumptions, being aware of their impact on the final business case result.

To know more about this topic or if you would like to discuss further, you can read the research note at”How to Develop a Business Case for the Adoption of Public Cloud IaaS” (paywall) or reach out to your Gartner representative to schedule an inquiry call with me. Looking forward to hearing your comments!

Neutralizing Shadow IT with Public Cloud Self-Service Governance

By Marco Meinardi in research

This post originally appeared on the Gartner Blog Network.

In today’s scenario where IT is at the core of business innovation, I hear organizations struggling with potentially opposing priorities. On one side, business users and developers want more agility and autonomy. On the other side, central IT must continue to achieve governance to minimize risks and improve efficiency at scale. Historically, organizations have prioritized a strictly controlled and centralized model, which was applicable because central IT was solely responsible for IT infrastructure and service delivery. However, since cloud computing, end users found an alternative path to achieving their goals, by going straight to cloud providers and bypassing central IT. Unfortunately, many of those shadow IT projects are not able to scale and expose the organization to uncontrolled risks.

Some organizations decided to address this well-known issue by reinforcing their measures to deny end user access to cloud services. Recently, a client told me how they’re blocking access on their firewall to all amazon.com IP addresses. Other organizations decided to apply their standard governance and operational processes to new cloud environments, often using the cloud just like another data center to simply provide compute, storage and network. Both of these solutions have proven to be unsuccessful as shadow IT continues to proliferate. In fact, none of these solutions enables end users to achieve the goals of becoming more autonomous and agile. Denying access or applying too much intermediation are not effective. Organizations who’ve been successful at neutralizing shadow IT have focused on enabling end users to achieve those goals while preserving the ability to enforce governance principles. To accomplish that, they’ve re-thought their operational and governance models and they became brokers of externally-sourced IT services.

Also cloud IaaS users want more autonomy and agility, they want to procure the infrastructure required to support their projects and they want to leverage the flexibility and scalability of public cloud providers as well as the access to the plethora of value-added services they offer. To support that, it is imperative that organizations develop a cloud IaaS self-service enablement and governance strategy. The figure below depicts the five approaches for self-service enablement that I collated in the recently published research note “5 Approaches for Public Cloud Self-Service Enablement and Governance” (paywall).

Some of the approaches described in the research provide fully automated provisioning workflows, others focus on regulating access and auditing end user activity and workload configurations. The illustrated approaches can provide different degrees of agility, access to innovation, end user autonomy, standardization, policy and control, provisioning automation and complexity. Therefore, it is important for organizations to understand their differences and trade-offs. However, there is no one-size-fits-all approach and technical professionals should master and implement all of them to address the different personas and use cases that live in the organization. The research also contains examples and code snippets on how to implement the described approaches on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

To know more about this topic, you can:

Looking forward to hearing your comments!

Evaluating Cloud Management Platforms and Tools With The Gartner Toolkit

By Marco Meinardi in research

This post originally appears on the Gartner Blog Network.

After several months of work, hundreds of customer calls and tens of vendor briefings, it’s finally out there: the Gartner’s “Evaluation Criteria for Cloud Management Platforms and Tools” has just published and is now available to Gartner clients. The research (which is available behind paywall at this link) contains 215 evaluation criteria divided into eight categories and four additional attributes (see the figure below). Gartner clients can use this research to assess cloud management vendor solutions and determine which areas of management they cover. Furthermore, clients will be able to compare the results of the assessments to select the cloud management platforms (CMPs) and tools that best align to their requirements.

The eight categories above serve as the primary scope for each criterion. The four attributes serve as additional scope and they apply to criteria across all eight categories. For example, the “provisioning policies” criterion belongs to the “Provisioning and Orchestration” category, but it’s also tagged with the “Governance” and “Life Cycle” attributes. This bidimensional classification is the result of the type of questions we receive from clients and that we want to answer with this research. For instance, clients often ask “what are the functions required to manage cloud costs?”, but also “how do I evaluate cloud governance tools?”. The approach we’ve taken will give clients the ability to quickly identify criteria from multiple overlapping perspectives.

Furthermore, all categories present a breakdown into “Required”, “Preferred” and “Optional”. This further classification is based on what Gartner thinks should be required for an enterprise-grade solution. However, clients are encouraged to tailor the evaluation criteria research with what they consider important for their organization. To do this, the research comes with an attached editable spreadsheet that clients can manipulate to prepare a tailored version of the evaluation criteria to support their RFI/RFP efforts.

Because CMPs on the market tend to provide a set of functions that differ based on the chosen cloud platform, clients should use this research to run a separate assessment for each of the cloud platforms they intend to use. For example, a CMP may support Amazon CloudWatch but not Azure Monitor as data source. Therefore, the CMP should be scored as “Yes” for AWS and “No” for Microsoft Azure with respect to the “Cloud-platform-native monitoring integration” criterion.

The wheel in the above figure has evolved a bit since the version of my previous post. However, that has been a necessary step to take as we dove into the actual requirements beneath each category. We are happy with the results of this research and we’re confident that Gartner clients will be as well. We encourage all clients to use the Evaluation Criteria for Cloud Management Platforms and Tools and share their feedback for future improvement or refinement.

To engage with me, feel free to schedule inquiry call (inquiry@gartner.com), follow me on Twitter (@meinardi) or connect with me on LinkedIn. Looking forward to talking to you!

Just Published: New Assessments of AWS, Azure and GCP Cloud IaaS

By Marco Meinardi in research

This post originally appears on the Gartner Blog Network.

Gartner has just published the updated cloud IaaS scores for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Gartner clients are normally used to see these updates coming once a year, but this time we decided to publish a quick incremental update, which is still based on last year’s 236-point Evaluation Criteria for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (research by Elias Khnaser, @ekhnaser). Considering the pace at which the three hyperscale cloud providers are moving, we felt the need to reassess their coverage with higher frequency.

Compared to the previous assessments occurred mid-summer 2017, these new assessments show a steady growth in feature coverage by all three providers, with GCP leading the growth with an overall increment of 12 percent points. Azure follows with five additional percent points and AWS, which was the provider with the highest coverage also last year, marked an increment of four percent points. The figure below shows the details of the movements occurred within this update, broken down by required, preferred and optional criteria. It is interesting to note how some scores also went down (see Azure, required). When scores go down, it is not always due to providers removing features, but sometimes – like in this case – due to the modification of the applicability of the criteria’s scope.

What’s exactly behind these changes? Gartner for Technical Professionals (GTP) clients can access the three research notes to find out. With this update to the in-depth assessments, we have also introduced a “What’s New” summary section and a detailed “Change Log”, so that clients can quickly determine what are the provider’s updates that drove the changes in the scores.

What are the areas where providers are investing more? What are the gaps that still exist in some of their offerings? Are those gaps important or negligible for your organization? Find the answer to these and other questions by accessing the detailed research notes at:

In the meantime, Gartner is also redefining the full list of evaluation criteria for cloud IaaS in light of provider innovation and the shift in customer requirements as they adopt more public cloud services. The next update of the providers scores will most likely be based on the revised evaluation criteria. Stay tuned for new and potentially surprising results!

Upcoming Research: Cloud Management Platforms

By Marco Meinardi in research

This post originally appeared on the Gartner Blog Network.

At Gartner, we’re often asked how to select cloud management platforms (CMP). We’ve been asked that question in the past, when a CMP was the software to transform virtualized data centers into API endpoints. We’re being asked the same question today, when a CMP is used to manage public clouds.

At Gartner Catalyst 2017 – one of the largest gathering of technical professionals – in one of my presentations I remarked how confused the market is. Even vendors don’t know whether they should call their product a CMP or not. In the last few years, the cloud management market has rapidly evolved. Public cloud providers have constantly released more native management tools. Organizations have continued to adopt public cloud services and have gradually abandoned the idea of building a cloud themselves. Public cloud services require the adoption of new processes and new tooling, such as in the areas of self-service enablement, governance and cost management. Finally, public cloud has to co-exist and co-operate with on-premises data centers in hybrid scenarios.

At Gartner, we’re committed to help our client organizations define their processes, translate them into management requirements and map them to market-leading tools. With the public cloud market maturing and playing a key role in the future of IT, we are now seeing the opportunity to make clarity and defining the functions that a CMP must provide.

My colleague Alan Waite and I are drafting the Evaluation Criteria (EC) for Cloud Management Platforms. An EC is a Gartner for Technical Professionals (GTP) branded research that lists the technical criteria of a specific technology and classifies them as required, preferred and optional. Clients can take an EC and use it to assess a vendor’s technical functionality. They can use it to form the basis for an RFP or even to simply define their management requirements. With our upcoming EC for CMPs, client organizations will be able to shed light on the confused cloud management market. They will be able to understand which tools to use for which management tasks and how to compare them against one another.

I’m bullish about the outcome of this research as I’m so looking forward to its publication. I’m extremely thankful to all the extended analyst community at Gartner who’s collaborating with me and Alan to increase the quality of this important piece of research. If you’re an existing Gartner client, don’t forget to track the “Cloud Computing” key initiative to be notified about the publication. if you’re willing to contribute to this research, feel free to schedule an inquiry or a vendor briefing with myself or Alan. Looking forward to the next update. Stay tuned!