Webinar recap: Obstacles and opportunities for the cloud-wary and cloud-wise

Internap’s webinar, Obstacles and Opportunities for the Cloud-Wary and Cloud-Wise, explored the details of our Cloud Landscape Report. Based on survey responses from 250 global Internet infrastructure professionals, the results highlight the problems faced by cloud-wise organizations that currently use cloud services, and those with no immediate plans to do so (the cloud-wary). Led by Adam Weissmuller, Internap’s Director of Product Management, Cloud Services, the webinar also discussed the growing demand for high-performance cloud solutions such as bare-metal cloud.

Performance challenges
Both the cloud-wary and the cloud-wise cite performance as a top pain point, with a majority of cloud-wise respondents specifically noting internal network performance problems. This is not surprising given the popularity of web-scale and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) apps that are designed to work best in the cloud. Along with fast, big data apps, new workload demands are putting pressure on public virtual clouds and creating challenges around performance and cost-at-scale, making it clear that the cloud is built for elasticity, not performance.

Cloud doesn’t have to be virtual
The changing application requirements are driving interest in bare-metal cloud, which offers the performance and security of a physical server with the flexibility and scalability of the cloud. 73% of survey respondents who cited cloud performance as a problem recognized that a single tenant or dedicated server would outperform a comparable virtualized offering. The survey also revealed that many organizations mistakenly equate virtualization with public cloud.

Hybridization
With flexible, on-demand provisioning capabilities, bare-metal servers do not require separate management tools from the rest of your infrastructure. At Internap, we believe that true hybridization includes having single-pane-of-glass visibility across your systems, along with a network interconnection that allows different platforms to talk to one another. The Internap customer portal provides visibility into your colocation, cloud and hosting assets, all in one place, without the need for multiple management consoles.

Watch the webinar on demand to learn more about the different challenges faced by the cloud-wary and cloud-wise.