Helping Your Clients Embrace the Cloud Can Reap Big Dividends
Digital transformation is affecting every industry, from manufacturing to hospitality and government to finance. As a service provider, you’ve probably seen how this period of rapid change is disrupting your customers—causing both stress and growth. Luckily, your customers’ digital transformation can be an opportunity for your organization too.
Digital transformation is driving increased cloud adoption. According to a new research report from 451 Research, multicloud scenarios are the norm, and that means organizations increasingly need Cloud Management Platforms (CMPs). This is where service providers can step in. One compelling option for CMPs is open source software, including the industry-leading OpenStack cloud.
Open source platforms such as OpenStack can help you to better support the digital transformation initiatives of your customers. By enabling customization, customer choice and support for a broader array of technologies and platforms, open source software such as OpenStack provides benefits proprietary offerings don’t. One of those benefits is the constant innovation and improvement that open source technologies experience due to the contributions of a large community of developers.
OpenStack isn’t a cure-all. It makes great sense for some scenarios and less so for others. The report details where service providers are likely to see the maximum potential opportunity:
Large Enterprises
The largest companies have been early adopters of open source technologies, and with their developer teams and in-house resources, they often have a better understanding of their CMP needs. 451 also expects that enterprise data center growth will occur mostly in hosted environments—private, public and dedicated—as enterprises move increasingly to the cloud.
Private Cloud Requirements
While not exclusively a private cloud opportunity, the majority of the open source CMP opportunity is with private cloud. OpenStack can’t compare or compete with hyperscale public cloud providers in terms of features and functionality, but it can provide the desired control in a private cloud scenario.
Regulated Industries
If you’re a service provider working with customers in a regulated industry such as finance or health care, you likely know the challenges better than anyone. There are often strict requirements that some applications and data run in-house or in a private cloud. This may rule out certain proprietary cloud offerings while creating the opportunity for open source cloud software.
Regional Requirements
Outside of the North American market, people are still wary of trusting the processing and storing of data to a U.S.-based vendor. In addition, legislation—such as the General Data Protection Requirements (GDPR) in Europe—is increasingly adding location and data-transit rules to customers’ burdens.
In these sectors and more, OpenStack presents service providers like you with a compelling opportunity. How to best take advantage of it is the next question. In the paper, you’ll learn:
- Which of the open source alternatives and go-to-market variations is best for you
- What you stand to gain from your investment
- How to best avoid the challenges involved