Ahead in the cloud

Domino’s has over 800 pizza stores in the UK, and each day serves up over a million pizzas. It used to be that you’d dial up the local chain, tell the person at the other end your order, and your Buffalo Chicken pizza would be dispatched on the back of a scooter. But the internet has changed all that; today, app-based, mobile and web sales account for 50 percent of Domino’s total volume. This increase in online platform delivery has been sustained and rapid, with a 34 percent increase in sales in the last year alone.

This massive rise in digital orders means Domino’s has had to make some pretty major upgrades to its data processing systems. They used to be entirely on-site, in the form of private servers, but at times of peak demand their capacity was insufficient, causing website errors, delays for customers, and a lot of stuffed crusts going cold.

A plan for four seasons The solution was the hybrid cloud: a system that allows enterprise to keep data secure in a private cloud, while using public cloud storage of computational resources to run applications that access and manipulate that data. In the case of IBM’s hybrid cloud, the streamlining of the various technologies involved reduces the occurrence of bottlenecks between what exists in the public cloud and what exists on site, allowing a more efficient workflow.

The flexibility of this system allowed Domino’s to maintain its onsite data processing system while having access to offsite servers for additional data processing in times of acute demand. This meant the company could deal with most of its data processing on site in times of normal demand, but accommodate extra traffic during peak periods without having to upgrade its on-site IT infrastructure. As a result of the hybrid cloud, security and efficiency are no longer a trade-off.

By using the hybrid cloud, businesses can add value and reduce costs, while also improving their policymaking processes. When combined with analytics services that help to evaluate, refine and synchronise data between the cloud, the company site and devices, the hybrid cloud is able to help firms make informed decisions with a far greater degree of accuracy, as non-obvious trends and correlations can begin to emerge.

By splitting tasks between private and public servers, hybrid cloud technology also helps create greater architectural flexibility. Workloads can be deployed for use on either a third-party server or an on-site server, based on the specific demands of each individual situation. Each task can be designated for processing through the most appropriate channel, boosting efficiency.

IBM even offers brokerage services to allow companies to plan, buy and manage IT services, picked and mixed from various cloud models and suppliers. That way, they can get all of the benefits of the very latest resources and platforms at a lower risk – and certainly lower cost – than if they were to try and take it on themselves. Scaling up, when needed, to a state-of-the-art infrastructure means companies can punch significantly above their weight – turning a small start-up in Wales into an international conglomerate, if only for a day.

Castles in the cloud While VMWare was one of the first companies to offer hybrid cloud solutions, most of the world’s biggest tech and IT firms have now caught up. Microsoft offers its Azure Cloud service, which, while established, is still being developed and improved, while HP is also known for its open-source hybrid cloud. Amazon and Google, huge players in in the public cloud, don’t currently cater for organisations that want to keep some data in-house.

When IBM was tasked with redesigning the digital platform for the Wimbledon Championships in 2015, it hosted the whole environment in its hybrid cloud. This approach allowed IBM to allocate cloud resources appropriately to each piece of digital content, ensuring a seamless experience in a year when visits to the platform ballooned to 71 million. It also allowed IBM to host the Wimbledon Social Command Centre in a separate IBM Cloud, and provide incremental capacity to supplement the main private cloud that has supported the tournament for years.

This elasticity is one of the key attractions of the hybrid approach – and business needs don’t get much more elastic than Wimbledon, which goes from more or less nothing for 50 weeks of the year to two weeks of absolute frenzy. The platform needs to scale efficiently by a factor of more than 100 within a matter of days as the interest builds ahead of the first match on Centre Court – and scale back down again just as efficiently.

Wimbledon is an extreme case, but all companies experience elasticity of one kind or another. How to deal with it without waste at the low ebb of demand and loss of business when overstretched is a fundamental issue facing business leaders the world over.

As data – and the efficient management of it – becomes ever more important to firms operating in today’s tech-centric economy, the most agile and forward-looking will be adopting hybrid cloud solutions in order to match their technological capabilities to their business needs.