Challenges of Public Cloud

Now, let’s go deeper into the challenges of the public cloud which enterprises face. Let’s draw an analogy with home-furnishing brand like IKEA, they are very easy to get started with. CSPs (Cloud Service Provider) are often like this brand. There are almost no barrier to entry and risk providing credit-card information to get started. and let’s talk about from the perspective of how you build, operate and grow your environment.

Build : With the whole furnishing companies, you just follow the directions to pick up the furniture you are interested in an you go build it by following their instructions. That’s okay for small projects. But for the larger ones, the experience is not as pleasant. And that’s exactly how CSPs work. They gibe you the basic constructs, for ex. they provide you with VPCs (Virtual Private cloud), route table, subnets, etc and then you have to figure out what to do with those constructs, how to put them together in order to house your applications. There is no best practice reference architecture from a networking perspective. Networking is not a forte of CSPs. Networking is not a reason why enterprises move to the public cloud in a first place. It’s all about the application.

Operate : From an operation perspective, they lack in mature toolkit for operating an environment from a networking standpoint. You may have basic tools like Flowlogs with some expert capability but with limited visualization. There are no tool to easily troubleshoot or to quickly troubleshoot issues. And remember, when you have a network operation centre along with certain skills within an on-premises environment, when they are responsible for operating the public cloud, they will be putting into very difficult position.

Grow : When you need to grow, say you need to expand from a single region to multiple regions or to another cloud which is in irreversible and rapidly growing trends, none of the CSPs can help you. They are not in the interest to provide multiple cloud support. So, you are pretty much on your own, when it comes to expansion beyond a single cloud.

So, these are the biggest challenges enterprises face when going to public cloud. The solution is to use cloud network platforms which may be helpful related to the above mentioned challenges.