My first Magazine Nutanix Flash Forward | Page 19

Chapter 2: Why Enterprise Cloud?

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out mid‐cycle. This approach provides good insurance, but it
means money is being left on the table.
The public cloud offers enterprises a new consumption
model for IT resources. Fractional consumption enables
pay‐as‐you‐grow economics, which allows you to buy
resources on demand. This is one of the primary economic
drivers behind cloud technology. CFOs and other financial
decision makers love being able to buy only what is needed.
However, fractional consumption in cloud also occurs as you
spin down. That is, as your business needs change, you can
reduce your resource utilization and, in turn, your monthly
payment.
The new model shifts the cost paradigm from a CapEx‐
intensive activity to one based almost solely on OpEx. Cloud
enables an OpEx focus because you have no need to buy a
bunch of hardware up front. The upfront CapEx‐intensive
purchasing paradigm is one that plagues legacy IT.

Near‐instant deployment
Perhaps one of the biggest downsides of legacy infrastructure
is the time needed to deploy new resources, which drives up
project latency. The result is frustration from business users
who have become accustomed to on‐demand services.
Public cloud services enable this kind of agile deployment. As
you or your business users want more services, your imagination is the limit.
You don’t have to
✓ Wait weeks for new hardware to arrive
✓ Rack and stack the new hardware
✓ Configure the new hardware to integrate with your existing environment
Instead, with cloud services, you can spin up infrastructure
and platform resources on demand with a single click to build,
test, and deploy applications. Building blocks — databases,
message queues, and so on — are available to deploy new
applications with zero wait time. This innovation drastically

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