Infrastructure Economics: Five Things to Consider When
Comparing Costs for Composable Infrastructure versus
Public Cloud
An Executive Brief Sponsored by Hewlett Packard Enterprise
If your organization is like most, you expect the public cloud to save you money. According to a
Frost & Sullivan survey, cost reduction remains the top driver for moving a workload to the cloud,
cited by 69% of IT decision-makers. 1 But few businesses actually calculate all the direct and indirect
costs associated with public cloud, and then compare those costs against alternatives, such as
Composable Infrastructure. Composable Infrastructure, an on-premises platform that delivers
cloud-like speed and flexibility, enables IT to deliver value rapidly and cost-effectively. In fact, when
all cost and value components are considered, enterprises may find that an investment in
Composable Infrastructure offers business value and benefits that public cloud deployments cannot
equal.
Composable Infrastructure provides a single infrastructure through which physical and virtual
resources can be composed into any configuration. Composable Infrastructure is built on three
architectural principles: fluid pools of compute, storage and network fabric; software-defined
intelligence; and the unified Application Programming Interface (API). It supports a broad range of
applications and operational models such as virtualization, hybrid cloud, and DevOps. By deploying
Composable Infrastructure, IT organizations can deliver business benefits such as flexibility, agility,
consistency, and speed to market.
As you assess infrastructure options, are you considering all the direct and indirect costs, as well as
value drivers? Here are five cost and value considerations that may help shape the way you think
about Composable Infrastructure versus public cloud.
1. “Speed to market” advantages
Speed to market represents a value component in the infrastructure comparison. The faster that
applications can be deployed and updated, the sooner the enterprise will realize benefits such as
customer retention, revenue increases, and reduced development and delivery costs.
Businesses recognize public cloud as a fast way to get to market: the ability to deploy or scale apps
with just a few clicks makes it easy to launch and update software. But organizations may not be
aware that the same flexibility and speed is available from their own data center with Composable
Infrastructure. With a Composable Infrastructure, the unified API supports DevOps processes,
enabling the organization to develop and deploy applications quickly.
Composable Infrastructure streamlines and automates critical development, deployment, and
provisioning processes through functionality such as:
•
1
Fully programmable infrastructure (also known as Infrastructure as Code) through the
unified API.
2015 Frost & Sullivan Cloud User Survey. For more information about Frost & Sullivan surveys, visit www.frost.com.
September 2016
© Stratecast | Frost & Sullivan, 2016
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•
DevOps support for automated infrastructure deployment, scaling, and updates. The unified
API aggregates physical, virtual, and cloud resources, so developers can code without
needing a detailed understanding of the underlying physical elements.
•
Integration with open source automation and DevOps tools such as Chef, Docker, and
OpenStack.
The bottom line: Composable Infrastructure is better suited than public cloud to deliver revenueand cost-impacting technology deployments at the pace of business, and to support DevOps
environments.
2. Capacity efficiencies
Most cloud users believe that the scalable, on-demand public cloud model eliminates
overprovisioning of capacity. But in fact, leading public cloud services are available only in pre-sized
bundles of processor, memory, and storage. If your workload needs across all components don’t
precisely match the available instance, you need to upgrade to a larger size—and pay for the unused
capacity.
With a flexible Composable Infrastructure, you have control over every component. You can define
the optimal amount of processing, storage, and network you need for a workload. And because
Composable Infrastructure enables provisioning to be done automatically via templates—unlike
public cloud where manual intervention is often needed to deploy or replicate a virtual machine
instance—continuous deployment is possible.
The bottom line: Compared with public cloud, Composable Infrastructure delivers better resource
utilization, more consistent application performance, and requires fewer labor resources.
3. Management and administration burden
When businesses outsource their infrastructure to a cloud service provider, they often think they’re
outsourcing the management headaches. But in fact, most businesses are shocked to find that their
management costs skyrocket for cloud workloads. IT decision makers responding to a Frost &
Sullivan survey said that for every $1 they spend on Infrastructure as a Service, they spend another
$3-5 on managing the service. 2 Migration, configuration, and even manual replication and scaling all
contribute to the unexpectedly high labor costs. Furthermore, management tools offered by the
cloud provider are often stand-alone, so you don’t achieve any economies from managing multiple
environments.
Composable Infrastructure, on the other hand, is designed to provide deep visibility and insight
across all infrastructure, via a single, simple user interface. The management platform reduces
operational effort and cost by combining software-defined intelligence with template-driven,
frictionless operations.
The bottom line: Composable Infrastructure delivers workforce flexibility, administrative
efficiencies, and less time spent on management and administrative tasks compared to public cloud
solutions.
2
2015 Frost & Sullivan Cloud User Survey
September 2016
© Stratecast | Frost & Sullivan, 2016
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4. Risk management
Concerns over security and compliance continue to be the top reasons why enterprises choose not to
move a workload to the public cloud. In the Frost & Sullivan survey, 64% of respondents cited
“unauthorized access to my data or applications” as their top concern about cloud; and 61% cited
“inability to meet compliance requirements.” “Loss of control over my applications” was named as a
concern by 57% of IT decision makers. 3 Without visibility into the cloud provider’s environment,
and with limited ability to control the application infrastructure, enterprises fear risking their
sensitive workloads in a shared cloud environment.
Premises-based Composable Infrastructure enables enterprises to retain full control over the
infrastructure, and to enforce corporate security policies consistently via template-driven
automation. Composable Infrastructure also supports enterprise compliance efforts. With the
infrastructure fully under enterprise control, organizations can be sure they adhere to data
sovereignty requirements, as well as data privacy standards for primary and backup environments.
Such control reduces the risk of penalties and sanctions resulting from compliance audits.
The bottom line: Composable infrastructure allows businesses to reduce business and compliance
risk—and associated costs—when compared to public cloud solutions.
5. Integration into a hybrid IT environment
Leading public cloud services utilize proprietary platforms that offer limited support for the hybrid
environments that most enterprises are implementing. That means that the enterprise IT department
(or a managed services partner) must take on the responsibility and costs of connecting and
integrating a range of environments and deployment models into a centrally-managed hybrid IT
environment. The challenge is onerous: for 24% of businesses, integrating premises-based and cloud
environments ranks in their top three challenges they face in implementing their hybrid cloud
strategy. 4
Composable Infrastructure is designed to support hybrid environments, including traditional IT and
cloud native applications, physical and virtual servers, premises-based and hosted cloud
environments. Composable Infrastructure offers orchestration and management tools that extend
across multiple services, from multiple service providers and independent software vendors, via a
unified API.
The bottom line: Composable Infrastructure is much better able to support a hybrid environment
without custom programming compared with public cloud solutions.
3
4
2015 Frost & Sullivan Cloud User Survey
Ibid.
September 2016
© Stratecast | Frost & Sullivan, 2016
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The Last Word
Like the decision to buy or lease a home, the choice to deploy Composable Infrastructure onpremises versus leasing public cloud capacity brings with it many nuanced cost and value
components. Businesses that opt for public cloud based on incomplete or faulty assumptions about
costs may find themselves spending more and getting less in the long run than if they had invested
in flexible Composable Infrastructure. What’s worse is that they may find they have missed an
opportunity to implement an agile, future-proof data center foundation that can deliver a
competitive edge into the future. Don’t let cost misrepresentations undermine your company’s
digital transformation. Consider how Composable Infrastructure fits into your company’s hybrid IT
strategy.
About Stratecast
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About Frost & Sullivan
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information about Frost & Sullivan’s Growth Partnership Services, visit http://www.frost.com.
September 2016
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