What is Cloud Washing?
The cloud represents a pot of gold that most vendors are trying to grab. In the gold rush, a new term has emerged: Cloudwashing. Cloud Washing is a term describing the deceptive practice of some vendors of rebranding old technology designed for on-premise data centre as Cloud Ready. The issue is, many of these “Cloud Ready” solutions are not designed exclusively for cloud.
So what is the disadvantage of using “Fake Cloud Ready” solutions?
There are several disadvantages for using fake cloud ready;
- Pricing. Cloud has a simple consumption based pricing. Many of these new “Cloud Ready” solutions have a complex pricing (example per user/fixed fee), which conflicts with cloud pricing. This disrupts your financial modelling based on cloud.
- Performance. Solutions that are gone through simple “Lift & Shift” will likely not be optimised for cloud and will have performance issues.
- Infrequent updates. Long update cycle (year or more).
- Scalability. No capability to automatically scale up and down based on demand.
- Availability. No built-in redundancy, you will need to deploy multiple appliances.
- Security. No unified security.
If your on premise solution does not have Cloud Native equivalent, then you need to consider alternatives.
Thank you for reading
Nick
