How Private Cloud-as-a-Service Enables a Successful Multi-Cloud Strategy

With more than 150,000 customers in 150 countries around the world, Rackspace has a front row seat to the unprecedented and accelerating change facing companies of all sizes, with all the opportunities and threats that change represents.

Driven by the rapid pace of technological innovation, these changes empower customers to expect top quality products and services on-demand. IT and business leaders must respond by leading a digital transformation of their enterprise — or face extinction.

But that journey is fraught with risk and disruption. We see it every day: IT and business leaders face numerous challenges, including the inability to experiment quickly, the burden of legacy systems and risk adverse cultures. Cost, security, skills and technical issues also present significant roadblocks.

With 20 years of experience helping customers use technology to achieve business goals, we know these business and IT challenges can be mitigated, with two crucial components: a true multi-cloud strategy — one that often includes some type of private cloud — and a strategic partner to help navigate, and even accelerate, the transformation journey.

This blog post describes, at a high level, how a managed private cloud as a service often fits into an overall multi-cloud strategy. In the coming weeks, we’ll take a deeper dive into the strategic flexibility, optimal economics and ease of migration private clouds can deliver.

Multi-cloud strategy

There is a reason why most companies today utilize some form of cloud computing — 96 percent, according to RightScale. Cloud services enable organizations to bond more closely with customers, innovate faster, deliver greater business and IT efficiencies and reduce cost.

Cloud adoption has matured to the point now where more than half of all enterprises are deploying multiple clouds to solve their business and technical challenges. Those include private on-premise, private-cloud-as-a-service, public cloud, managed hosting and colocation, combined in a wide range of hybrid and multi-cloud configurations to optimize workload performance, cost, data locality, security and agility.

Discovering just the right combination, and making sure everything works together, of course, is an ongoing challenge — and that’s where a strategic partner comes in. Before we get to that, however, let’s take a deeper dive into how private cloud can fit into a successful multi-cloud strategy.

Strategic reasons to deploy private cloud

Private clouds can solve certain very specific challenges as part of a multi-cloud strategy, by delivering on a specific set of value propositions. It’s an ideal platform for certain enterprise workloads for the following reasons:

• Strategic flexibility: decisions made today can chart the course for competitiveness (or lack thereof) for years to come. Organizations simply cannot afford to be locked in to a single platform or technology. Open APIs and frameworks that maintain portability across clouds are critical components of any cloud strategy.
• Better economics: A platform portfolio that enables economic optimization now and in the future is also key. Private clouds, especially when deployed as a managed private cloud, as a service, can offer significant savings over public cloud and DIY solutions for most enterprise applications.
• Easier migration: The right platform choices make migration easier, faster and more reliable, enabling significant cost and efficiency gains while reducing risk. For example, by using private cloud-as-a-service, many applications do not have to be refactored to successfully move to cloud.

The benefits of a multi-cloud strategy — and the reasons to make private cloud part of that strategy — are clear. But IT teams must still navigate all the cloud options, services and deployment patterns in ways that minimize risk while maximizing return.

Finding the right strategic partner

What if your organization had a strategic partner to accelerate the journey to a digital business by transforming traditional IT to IT-as-a-service and break through the logjam of competing priorities? A partner with the methodologies, integrated products and ecosystem to design and implement exactly the right mix of infrastructure, platforms and services to drive business outcomes, today and in the future?

Rackspace is that partner — one that delivers true transformation-as-a-service across applications, data, security and infrastructure, relieving IT of the operational burdens complex cloud infrastructure imposes while delivering the benefits of cloud computing to the business.

Working with IT and business leaders, Rackspace enhances an enterprise’s ability to delight its customers, become agile responding to the accelerating rate that opportunities and threats materialize, and drive new revenue and value streams. We deliver “transformation-as-a-service” through IT-as-a-Service, bringing an unbiased point of view, informed by two decades of experience helping organizations transform their IT with an unrivaled portfolio of modern technologies.

That includes Rackspace’s private cloud platform, which offers enterprises strategic flexibility with the widest range of technology, economic, and deployment models, delivered as a fully managed cloud service. For most enterprise applications, Rackspace Private-Cloud-as-a-Service delivers a superior economic model and easier migration paths to the cloud. Accessed via industry-standard APIs, with no lock-in, and backed by market-leading SLAs delivering a Fanatical Experience, Rackspace Private-Cloud-as-a-Service provides enterprise applications a successful path to the cloud.

No matter where your organization is along its cloud journey, our specialists can help develop the right multi-cloud strategy. Our experts will assess your existing infrastructure and application portfolio, review your cost structure and identify the best fit platforms for your needs. Put our experts to work for your IT transformation.