Bringing the cloud to the data center

As we’ve noted in our posts over the past year, hybrid cloud has been a frequent subtheme of our research. Prior to the onset of the pandemic, we were already sensing the cloud to be taking a front and center role with enterprises shaping their future strategy.

In our year-ahead post, we forecast that the 2020s would be the point where cloud transformation taking center stage. It’s been building, from the tactical consumption of cloud services by AppDev teams to the opportunistic building of new apps for mobile and similar services that live in the digital world, to more recently, uptake in demand for services that can only be offered in the public cloud because of their appetite for data and scale, such as AutoML.

The underlying drivers for this shift to cloud include taking advantage of services not otherwise available on premises, but there’s also something far more fundamental at play. In a world where the landscape is constantly changing, enterprises are seeking to take advantage of the operational simplicity, flexibility, and scale that the cloud offers. But for many organizations, the reality is that the public cloud is not always a visible option – there may be policy or jurisdictional reasons for that. But these same organizations are no less hungry for the benefits of the cloud that can free them to focus on their business and innovate. That was the context by which we introduced the concept of The Hybrid Default: the embrace of cloud-native computing as the default choice, regardless of whether that occurs in the public cloud, a trusted third-party colocation center, or the company’s own data center.

That need for delivering the benefits of cloud on-premises in turn drove our release of an in-depth competitive landscape on hybrid cloud infrastructure platforms, that is available for free download. 

In its latest round of announcements, Oracle added yet another twist that changes the assumptions around hybrid cloud – that it can at best only deliver a subset of services available int the public cloud. It introduced a new option to its Cloud@Customer hybrid cloud turnkey solution (dedicated hardware that Oracle manages) called Dedicated Region. The significance of Dedicated Region is that Oracle now provides practically the full menu of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS services that it currently offers in the Oracle Public Cloud. With Dedicated Region, they are the only cloud provider to do so.

We had the chance to get an advance peek at Dedicated Region and a related announcement: the release of the Autonomous Database on Cloud@Customer. We were engaged by Oracle to deliver a white paper providing our perspective of their offering. We’re pleased to announce that the paper is now available for download on Oracle.com, with a short video to follow soon.

As always, we’re interested in hearing your comments on our LinkedIn page.