The cloud has become a core element of an organization’s technology strategy, offering significant cost-saving, scalability, and security advantages over traditional data centers. Given its multifaceted benefits, many of today’s organizations are shifting from on-premises solutions and moving their data and mission-critical applications in the cloud. But with the diverse range of cloud service offerings in the market, it’s important for enterprises to seek out the right approach and solution that can help them meet their business needs as well as ensure a successful cloud adoption.
To help organizations solve the challenges associated with cloud adoption, ZeroStack, a California-based cloud platform vendor, offers a suite of solutions designed to enable businesses to leverage, adopt, and make the most of their cloud computing infrastructure. As a trusted provider of next-generation private cloud solution, ZeroStack aims to deliver a private cloud experience that unifies applications, infrastructure, and operations.
SourceForge had the opportunity to speak with Stephen Garrison, the Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at ZeroStack, to discuss the challenges of cloud adoption, the different types of cloud, and the advantages of using hybrid cloud and multi-cloud solutions over a single cloud strategy. Garrison also shared with us how ZeroStack can help businesses remove the complexity of building and managing a private cloud.
Q: Please share with our readers a brief company information about ZeroStack (i.e. year founded, headquarters, size, etc.)
A: Founded in 2014 by senior engineers from VMware, ZeroStack currently has 55 employees and is funded by Formation 8 and Foundation Capital.
Stephen Garrison, the VP of Marketing & Business Development at ZeroStack
Based in Mountain View, California, ZeroStack delivers an on-premises, cloud-native environment that provisions applications to customers with a single mouse click. With ZeroStack’s Self-Driving On-Premises Cloud platform, enterprises and MSPs can simplify operations, reduce costs, and accelerate IT by 10X over virtualized solutions while maintaining IT control. ZeroStack enables multi-tenant, multi-cloud, and containerized environments with a future-ready architecture.
Q: Cloud computing is available in a variety of deployment models and strategies, specifically private, public, and hybrid models. Can you help us inform our readers about the characteristics and limitations of each cloud type?
A: Public cloud allows rapid access to application development resources and supports broad application deployment, but it does not offer the security, performance, and control of private cloud. Private cloud delivers control, governance, security, and scale with controlled costs and the lowest latency. It offers the best opportunity to tune cloud resources and performance for specific applications. Hybrid cloud is a combination of these two approaches. Most companies are deploying both public cloud and private cloud resources to obtain the best of both worlds.
Q: What are the ways in which the cloud as a whole has brought cost-saving benefits to both small and midsize businesses and large-scale enterprises?
A: Cloud saves companies money because it abstracts hardware from software, streamlines application development, and offers self-service application provisioning by end users. With cloud, companies can roll out applications more quickly while slashing IT costs. The ZeroStack cloud offers open APIs so it can support/connect to any other application or cloud, along with the ability to leverage automation so the IT team can focus on developing apps rather than running the infrastructure
Q: Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud are terms that have been generating buzz in the cloud computing market this year. Broadly speaking, what are the differences between hybrid cloud and multi-cloud approaches? How do you directly define these terms?
A: Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud approaches are closely related. Multi-cloud implies that there will be many different public clouds for specific constituencies or geographies, while hybrid cloud involves using both public and private cloud in the overall infrastructure. Gartner estimates that 80 percent of companies will have two cloud providers, while 50 percent will have more than two clouds.
Q: In your opinion, what do you think are the reasons more and more businesses are adopting multi-cloud and hybrid cloud approaches? What are the key business benefits of moving to a multi-cloud environment or using multiple cloud services?
A: Companies are moving to multi-cloud and hybrid cloud because there are different clouds for specific purposes. For example, a company might use AWS public cloud for initial development of applications, and then move those applications to a private cloud for cost-effective production deployment. Microsoft shops might use the Azure public cloud because it is tuned for Microsoft apps and development tools. Having a multi-cloud strategy allows a company to tune its cloud resources for agility, control, risk, governance, and cost.
Q: According to Research and Markets, the world’s leading market research store, the global multi-cloud management market size is expected to reach $6.1 billion by 2023. Some major factors that help drive the growth of the market are vendor lock-in issues, the growing need for policy compliance from regulatory bodies for data security, the inclination to price-sensitive cloud deployments, and the unreliability of single cloud solutions. In your opinion, is there still a place for a single cloud strategy in today’s market? What do you think are the reasons a business would stay with a single cloud strategy?
A: We don’t believe that there is a place for a single-cloud strategy except for the smallest businesses. A company might stay with a public cloud strategy because its needs are very limited, but we don’t think cloud should be a lock-in proposition, which is why ZeroStack offers integration between its private cloud and public clouds.
Q: Are there “blind spots” or challenges that businesses should be prepared to face when migrating to the cloud or using multiple cloud services? How does ZeroStack help businesses address these challenges?
A: The main blind spot is customers letting go of legacy systems to leap forward with a cloud environment. Even though it is very expensive and inefficient to manage legacy infrastructure and roll out applications on it, some companies fear change and the idea of using new tools and potentially re-assigning roles within the IT team. However, the cloud is rapidly becoming a universal IT strategy.
ZeroStack helps companies address the challenges of moving to the cloud by making it easier to migrate. The following are some of the benefits of using ZeroStack:
- Our platform can start on as few as four servers and scale up indefinitely from there.
- We offer automated provisioning, so an IT admin can deploy our cloud in less than 30 minutes.
- We deliver a self-healing cloud infrastructure that slashes operational overhead.
- We offer more than 40 application development tools that can be self-provisioned with a single click.
Q: Tell us a bit more about ZeroStack’s product suite. How can ZeroStack help businesses of all sizes enjoy a successful and pain-free adoption to a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environment?
A: ZeroStack enables secure multi-tenant and multi-cloud environments with a future-ready architecture. We offer private cloud control and cost management with public cloud ease of use. Our intelligent cloud platform is web managed to simplify operations, delivering a 10X reduction in operational overhead and a 10X reduction in costs. By automating tasks that IT hates to do (such as resource provisioning), ZeroStack also accelerates the application deployment process by 10X. The enterprise’s data stays on-premises to ensure that IT has total control, and IT controls user resource thresholds to optimize infrastructure for the highest performance and the lowest latency.
With ZeroStack, IT admins and developers can each use the web browser of their choice to drive the cloud experience. The on-premises, self-healing control software on hyper-converged hardware ensures that users receive the always-on cloud uptime everyone expects.
Finally, since virtually all organizations will adopt a multi-cloud strategy, ZeroStack’s cloud is integrated with VMware and public clouds, giving users the ability to avoid cloud lock-in. This integration also ensures that developers can start workloads in a public cloud and then move them on premises to control costs as they go into production.
Q: What are the key capabilities and benefits of ZeroStack’s intelligent cloud solutions?
A: ZeroStack’s Self-Driving Private Cloud platform is a full-featured business transformation platform that delivers public cloud ease-of-use with private cloud security, governance, and cost control.
ZeroStack’s Intelligent Cloud Platform
We leverage AI and machine learning techniques to automate cloud operations, resource allocation, and upgrades as well as offer a comprehensive set of APIs to enable bespoke automation and customization. Plus, we provide a similar toolset and environment to AWS / public cloud with the ability to optimize performance as needed.
Q: Looking ahead, what emerging trends, technologies, and/or strategies are bound to shape the future of the cloud industry?
A: Every business runs on software, and companies are transitioning from in-house, traditional architecture (separate compute, storage, and networking silos) to cloud-based architecture because it delivers high agility with much lower operational costs. Business transformation depends on the ability to quickly develop, seamlessly integrate, and effortlessly roll out applications to a broadly distributed user base while leveraging big data for business intelligence. Companies need a platform that supports their application development and deployment along with big data applications, and a multi-cloud strategy gives them the features and support they need.
The future of the cloud industry is to become more integrated with business transformation initiatives by supporting multi-cloud integration, rapid deployment and provisioning, and automated operations.
About ZeroStack
Headquartered in Mountain View, California, ZeroStack provides a public cloud experience with private cloud control through a robust software solution that enables businesses to automate their cloud applications, operations, and infrastructure. Established in 2014, ZeroStack has been helping enterprises and managed service providers (MSPs) streamline their operations and improve their performance while reducing costs and maintaining control of their IT.