Avoiding the Public Clouds’ Hotel California Effect
Australian taxpayers have a lot at stake as agencies ramp up their transition to modern hybrid IT environments.
The legacy outsourced supply contracts many government agencies have endured for years have too often locked them into expensive, inflexible arrangements – sometimes so opaque that agencies don’t even know what infrastructure they own.
One of the benefits of governments embracing cloud is the opportunity to break free of this old-world artefact, and gain the capability to match infrastructure to particular workload requirements.
The Lock-in Trap
Unfortunately, some agencies have found a new lock-in trap awaits unwary players in the cloud. Often an application built in one public cloud cannot be moved to another. It is stuck fast unless re-written for another environment. The Hotel California effect – “You can check in any time you like, but you can never leave.”
This is one of the things that makes the recently signed exclusive partnership between Macquarie Government and D2IQ (formerly Mesosphere) so exciting for government agencies.
Containerisation
Applications built using D2IQ are containerised; they can be transported across platforms, be it on-premises, private or public cloud environments.
This allows application elements to be mapped to the most suitable cloud environment among the different environments offered by cloud providers.
This portability is necessary if agencies are going to truly take control of their own destiny and create a sustainable, competitive marketplace for cloud services to government.
The Digital Transformation Agency has spoken about trying to stimulate a market where hyperscale, scale and niche cloud providers are vying for government business. But that is only going to become a reality if those agencies have the option of shifting their applications between providers to optimise value and performance.
While there are companies with a vested interest in continuing the unhappy history of governments being locked in to particular vendors, technologies like D2IQ offer agencies an opportunity to resist this while embracing all the modernising benefits of cloud.
The D2IQ technology is a natural fit with Macquarie’s high performance, built-for-government cloud.
Our cloud is ASD-certified for DLM and PROTECTED (classified) government workloads, and is listed on ASD’s Certified Cloud Selection List (CCSL).
