The future of All-In and Over the Top: Choice Reigns
This is part 3 in a 3-part series by Patrick Kerpan, CEO and co-founder at Cohesive Networks
Check out part 1: The Next big cloud technology movement isn’t a winner takes all battle and see part 2: The Tech Tug of War
This generation’s IT buyers and business are not getting tricked into anything. All-in and Over the Top are choices that empower organization to do more with existing resources, global customer reach, and the continuing sprawl of technology options.
All-in Is Not a Life Sentence
There is huge momentum behind the “all-in” movement because it is so easy to spin up quick tests and worry-free apps without fussing with the servers. All-in systems will triumph where speed and agility matter most.
Committing to a provider’s services makes application migration near impossible (at least today), but these organizations are solving for a different outcome. Worries about vendor “lock-in” are easily trumped by all the other concerns they are balancing: scale, reliability, time to market, minimizing code development, access to skills, etc. When building for rapid dev/test or single-use, the short life of a web server will probably outlive any vendor lock-in issues.
Over the Top Does Not Mean Going It Alone
Organizations that need flexible cloud infrastructure want to create their own custom services for their applications and servers. Over the top systems will triumph where attestable control matters most.
There are organizations that want to oversee their infrastructure, even if it means managing more complexity. IT team will want to attest to data security themselves, and they will need to control the servers, networks, and regions for their apps. Over the top can help organization use the best of cloud resources while still maintaining rigid standards for compliance, high availability, or user access.
By standing on the shoulders of the cloud IaaS giants, organizations can add points of presence and attestable control. Businesses increasingly want to locate features, functions, and data in a particular geography. Partners and customers can access resources from cloud edge locations — a basic cloud feature for all users — while the over the top services on top can layer in security, compliance, and control. For “attestable control” organizations can choose their own destiny for additional security, flexibility, portability and so on. That control of key security components gives more organizations the ability to confidently answer the questions:
“Am I the only one who can access and view my security settings?”
“Can I prove this data have never been accessed from beyond my control?” “Is my data moving securely through a third party network / public internet? “Do I have full insight, visibility and control of my environment?”
All-in or Over the Top? It’s not a battle
This as the new non-battle in tech: will you choose all-in cloud platform components or choose to build your own next-layer app infrastructure over the top of cloud providers? Why not both?
cloud new design center
Non-Battle of Waterloo: Up and Over the Walled Gardens
With cloud IaaS, organizations can use underlying infrastructure to build their own virtual infrastructures, custom application infrastructure, platform services, and applications. New services and technologies from Lamdba to containers offer more choices for organizations.
For organizations that want light-speed resources and don’t care to mind the details, cloud offerings like Serverless and AWS Lambda are a perfect fit. Going all-in is a conscious choice to build the most efficient resources. All-in organizations can leapfrog setup time and speed past infrastructure complexity.
Over the Top services let users customize any cloud or virtual environment while managing the inherent complexity. With underlying cloud IaaS that is fast, cheap, and elastic, enterprises can also build fully customized applications. Organizations can achieve attestable control to pass security audits, while reducing time to market, with points of presence in key markets, all while running on commodity priced IaaS.
What’s not to love about more choices?
About the Author
Patrick Kerpan is CEO & CTO at Cohesive Networks. Previously was CTO at Borland, founded Bedouin, and managing director for derivatives technology at banks.
Make sure to also read:
- “Guard Against Cyberattacks — Application Segmentation and Security” -putting the concept of defense in depth into the cloud application layer
- “Putting the NIST Cybersecurity Framework to Work” a use case for applying the Framework to an IT organization
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