If you’re not in the business of managing and maintaining (server) hardware, then why continue to manage and maintain hardware? 

If you’re still purchasing, managing, and maintaining hardware in a colocation/datacenter, or even on-prem, now might be a good time to consider your options. Even if you’re not concerned about scalability, there are many other considerations including value vs. cost and practicality. 

I’m not suggesting you jump headfirst into a Hypercloud environment, like AWS, Azure, GCP, IBM, Alibaba….  Besides, if you have any custom, highly-proprietary, or legacy applications they probably won’t work anyway, but at least talk to an expert and explore your options. If you do have specialized apps a Private Cloud or, better yet, a hybrid approach may do the trick. Even a hybrid Colo/Public Cloud solution covers many bases. 

For many looking to get out of the hardware business, a hybrid solution that includes colocation (and/or on-premise) plus any combination of one or more cloud options is best in order to account for hardware that still has plenty of life left. 

Any hardware is going to have its share of ongoing maintenance & support (M&S) costs and always has a large CAPEX/up-front cost no matter how you slice it. Even when leasing, many systems may be considered a capital lease. 

There are of course cases where some of your hardware may run low and very low priority services and apps where one wouldn’t bother renewing M&S. But for any hardware running even marginally important applications, M&S is also critical and starts to get pricey. Plus, how reliable is that high-priced, 4-hour, advanced replacement support anyway? 

Regardless, and, at the least, putting that hardware in a colocation / datacenter often makes a lot of sense. They are super secure (physically) with redundant, clean power, and plenty of bandwidth options among other benefits. And, if you find the right place, they may even have “smart-hands” services. 

A Private Cloud, which is a subset of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), gives you the benefits of having your own completely private stack of (hardware) resources and a colo, all in one (plus a lot more). It could be argued that the term “private cloud” would include an enterprise’s hardware and colo. For our purposes, we are considering it to be a service or solution from a cloud provider. 

With Private Cloud, you don’t need to own, manage, maintain or worry about the hardware itself. You’ll never have to make a 3am run to the datacenter again! Your “beeper” will never go off in the middle of the night telling you of an emergency “disk failure”. Although, I certainly appreciate the “benefits” of being able to say “sorry, boss. Got an emergency at the datacenter. I’ll be back in a few hours”. Then sit for a while with some peace and “quiet” in the nice, cool datacenter while enjoying the tranquil, melodious hum of hardworking servers. 

You can get a private environment made-to-order so it will safely run just about anything you need it to and you can arrange the environment so it’s completely yours from top to bottom, where you do not share any resources with others. There are also variants to “all yours”  where you can really maximize value and get more bang for your buck by offloading some less critical services to the provider’s “public” options. In this case, “just a few” resources might be shared. All you worry about is the hypervisor and/or containers and the services and apps running on it. Private is easier to scale when needed, compared to doing it all yourself, but may have longer lead times than other cloud options. 

Public Cloud (not to be confused with Hypercloud) is similar to Private Cloud but could be considered less flexible because you’re sharing both physical and compute-and-storage resources with the provider’s other customers. While you will be sharing other resources, this in no way implies that you can see the other customers' stuff or that they can see yours, it’s all properly “partitioned”.  But your virtual systems are on the same hardware as others. In this case, the hardware itself is less customizable than is so with Private Cloud. 

Hypercloud (a.k.a. Hyperscale, Hyperscaler), again not to be confused with Public Cloud, is a different story and not for the faint of heart. If you’ve ever had to buy a server, you know you need to (for the sake of brevity) determine what it will be doing, what it will need in order to do it, configure and spec. it out with a little more than you think you need, compare options and prices, order, and you’re off to the races (I realize it’s more complicated, but work with me here). 

In the Hyperscale world, nearly every single specification and line item you just configured for that new server or other hardware is now a variable, consumable, cost that fluctuates with usage. There are of course many variants, configurations, and options with Hypercloud, which is one of its many allures, but to say it is any entirely different world is not an understatement. This is not said to distract or dissuade anyone from exploring such lore. In fact, the features, benefits, and value of Hyperscale are numerous. It is to say however that Hypercloud is different. So, get help, come armed with your desired outcomes, and proceed with a healthy dose of skepticism. 

If you’re fresh, green, and just coming out of the hardware world of things, a dive into the deep end of Hyperscale may not be the best first move. 

The best part is you don’t have to go all-in on any single option. With the right experts on your side, you can mix and match any way you choose to best fit your needs. Whether you plan to jump in head first, or prefer a regimented, methodical, 5-year migration plan, get proper impartial and vendor-neutral expert help to guide you through the research, planning, evaluation, and comparison of all the options.

Next up. How much does all of this cost?