How over-provisioned is your existing on-premises infrastructure? Could moving to a hybrid cloud environment get you better economics and much needed scale? Is going “cold turkey” on underperforming and expensive legacy infrastructure even possible?

More and more CIOs and IT Directors are starting to ask themselves these questions. Especially since their top priority for 2018 is growth, according to Gartner’s 2018 CIO Agenda Report.1 But how can you grow explosively without blowing the IT budget?

Many business leaders are turning to the cloud for answers. According to Paul Miller, Senior Analyst at Forrester, “Public cloud platforms continue to attract much of the cloud mindshare, and they are definitely growing strongly in all significant markets. The arguments that public clouds cannot scale, are not secure, are not ‘enterprise-grade,’ and will never be allowed by regulators to host sensitive workloads are being dismantled one by one.”2 And what about cost? Could utilizing hybrid environments with the correct cloud endpoint be the answer?

Most CIOs are searching for greater scalability, higher performance, and better or faster access to technology resources.3 Surprisingly—while many still move to the cloud for cost-saving reasons—it’s really the potential for growth and new technology innovation that’s driving the change.

While building a scalable, flexible infrastructure capable of true machine learning and AI-based innovations – like natural language interfaces and big data analysis – is possible with on-premises hardware, it’s an expensive proposition all by itself. But moving all that IT infrastructure to a hybrid cloud? Now that’s possible, and plausible nowadays and more affordable than you may realize. But which public cloud? Here’s why you might want to consider Google Cloud as your go-to public cloud endpoint:

It’s easier and faster than you think. According to Jack Constantine, Chief Digital Officer for Lush, a global cosmetics company, “The migration to Google Cloud Platform was surprisingly swift. In 22 days, we were up and running.”4
Google Cloud costs less. Just as an example—Lush was able to reduce its infrastructure hosting costs by 40%.4 While it’s hard to say for certain, the overall consensus is that Google Cloud saves on infrastructure costs.
Google Cloud is the best for hybrid. With industry leading on-prem partnerships, focusing on cloud-native, microservices based workload approaches, and easily demonstrated today, Google Cloud Platform is a superior hybrid cloud platform for today’s modern IT workloads.
It’s smart—no really—it’s smart. Google’s Cloud AI provides modern machine learning services, with pre-trained models and a service to generate your own tailored models. Their neural-net-based ML service has better training performance and increased accuracy compared to other deep learning systems.

Going 100% cold turkey on your on-premises infrastructure may seem drastic, but exploring how you could be benefiting from the cloud isn’t just a daydream. Luckily, IGNW can help you now on your journey to Google Cloud or Google hybrid clouds.

IGNW is proud to be part of the Google Cloud ecosystem and recently named as one of Google’s exclusive Google Premier Managed Partners in the Googles Services Track. What this special partnership means is that IGNW has the inside track to help customers easily onboard and consume Google’s unique sets of cloud services. IGNW can help clients differentiate between all their cloud options, and find the ones that are the right fit for their business. With Google, IGNW can specifically help with:

Advanced services within the Google Cloud Platform
Consuming Google products and services to streamline business operations
Application Development - Use the best of Google Cloud Platform to build and manage cloud-native business apps
Architecting, building, and migrating customer infrastructure and workflows to Google Cloud Platform
Integration and automation of Cisco CCP and Google Cloud for a modern Hybrid IT platform
API delivery, management, and analysis with Google’s Apigee platform
Training and delivery

So why not act now before the holidays kick in and see if moving to Google Cloud is right for you?

Sources:

1) Gartner: 2018 CIO Agenda https://www.gartner.com/imagesrv/cio-trends/pdf/cio_agenda_2018.pdf

2) Forrester: “A New Forrester Wave Assesses The Market For Hosted Private Cloud In Europe” July 2017 https://go.forrester.com/blogs/we-assess-market-for-hosted-private-cloud-in-europe-with-new-forrester-wave/

3) IteropITX, 2017 State of the Cloud Report http://images.reg.techweb.com/Web/UBMTechweb/%7B2bfb5862-f807-43da-a66d-f8ba4bfe5ce0%7D_inlv17_stateofcloud.pdf

4) Google: Lush: Global Migration in 22 Days https://cloud.google.com/customers/lush/