CLOUD OR NOT TO CLOUD?
There is an extensive amount of hype, chatter and confusion around the concept of CLOUD because over the last few years no other area of IT has produced as much investment and interest as cloud computing.
We can definitely state that Cloud market has been not only established but also segmented into PUBLIC, PRIVATE and HYBRID categories.
So what is a Cloud landscape and what are major players?. The AWS or the Amazon Web Services is the dominating and the leading player in cloud computing, closely followed by Microsoft Azure, the Rackspace Public cloud, and VMware’s vCloud. The above is not static as statistics change rapidly.
WHICH CLOUD IS GOOD FOR YOUR COMPANY?
In general, if you are a startup company, you would be better off with Public cloud, however if your business already has I.T. infrastructure – most likely you will end up with Hybrid cloud.
Choosing which Cloud segment is good for your scenario is quite challenging as many factors needs to be carefully considered before a decision is made.
Let’s compare 3x Cloud models in a simple way.
PUBLIC CLOUD
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Public Cloud is based on public internet access. Service providers like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and others use the internet for connecting customers to resources such as compute, storage and applications hosted by their centers located around globe.
For customers, Public Cloud will provide the best economies of scale, are inexpensive to set-up because hardware, application and bandwidth costs are covered by the provider. It’s a pay-per-usage model and the only costs incurred are based on the capacity that is used.
There are some limitations, however; the Public Cloud may not be the right fit for every organization. The model can limit configuration, security, and SLA specificity, making it less-than-ideal for services using sensitive data that is subject to compliancy regulations.
PRIVATE CLOUD
Private clouds are data center architectures owned by a single company that provides flexibility, scalability, provisioning, automation and monitoring. The goal of a private cloud is not sell “as-a-service” offerings to external customers but instead to gain the benefits of cloud architecture without giving up the control of maintaining your own data center.
Private clouds can be expensive with typically modest economies of scale. This is usually not an option for the average Small-to-Medium sized business and is most typically put to use by large enterprises. Private clouds are driven by concerns around security and compliance, and keeping assets within the firewall.
HYBRID CLOUD
By using a hybrid approach,
Hybrid Cloud step in where companies can maintain control of an internally managed private cloud while relying on the public cloud as needed. For instance during peak periods individual applications, or portions of applications can be migrated to the Public Cloud. This will also be beneficial during predictable outages: hurricane warnings, scheduled maintenance windows, rolling brown/blackouts.
The ability to maintain an off-premise disaster recovery site for most organizations is impossible due to cost. While there are lower cost solutions and alternatives the lower down the spectrum an organization gets, the capability to recover data quickly reduces. Cloud based Disaster Recovery (DR)/Business Continuity (BC) services allow organizations to contract failover out to a Managed Services Provider that maintains multi-tenant infrastructure for DR/BC, and specializes in getting business back online quickly.
HOW WE CAN HELP?
Choosing a required Cloud type and then a Cloud vendor are tricky processes. If picking the right Cloud type requires knowing in depth your existing infrastructure and business goals, then choosing a Cloud vendor requires much more including faith and trust in a particular vendor.
We help companies to find a perfect match and then integrate Cloud technologies into business infrastructure, call us on 1300 305 588 for a FREE INDEPENDANT ADVICE.
