Business adoption of private clouds has picked up steam thanks to flexible platform-as-a-service solutions built upon OpenStack. At the same time, many enterprises have made avoidable mistakes while setting up cloud infrastructure. These errors range from inaccurate assessment of current hardware assets to oversights in planning for future capacity.
The recent OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong brought the issue of private cloud deployment to the fore. Speaking to conference-goers, Metacloud founder Steve Curry highlighted some of the common setbacks in this area, arguing that companies may be struggling to transition from public to private storage.
For example, builders may be neglecting to perform analysis of the total cost of ownership. In the case of private clouds, this due diligence requires consideration of factors that did not need to be considered when assessing public solutions. Similarly, some IT departments may have distorted views of private cloud costs because they believe that new hardware is essential for setup.
However, as Curry pointed out, OpenStack can run on a variety of cloud hardware. Enterprises can repurpose old appliances with open source software, making them essential parts of cloud implementations.
As businesses grow, their storage requirements will change. Accordingly, it is imperative that they pick solutions that are flexible enough to evolve and serve company needs at all levels.
“[T]he best cloud storage solutions may be the ones that can grow alongside your business,” asserted Brett Nuckles in a piece for BusinessNewsDaily. “You may be starting off with just a handful of employees, but consider picking a service that can accommodate your company well into the future.”
Nuckles also mentioned of software tools that facilitate collaboration and automatic file sync. For organizations with stringent security obligations, these capabilities are essential for building a safe yet high-performing private cloud system.
