The Cloud Deployment is a revolutionary facility providing configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction”
Cloud: The Possibilities & Consequences
Here is how Cloud is economical for businesses:
Increased ROI: Cloud Migration services do away with a lot of capital expenditures and operational expenditures. Businesses no longer need to purchase servers and data centers, thereby increasing their ROI, as well as reducing maintenance costs.
Reduced Go-To-Market time: Projects can be brought to market at a much rapid pace as compared to those done on in-house servers. Extra servers may be provisioned from the cloud as per project requirement, allowing businesses to pay more attention to app development and reducing market introduction timelines.
Scalability: The Cloud’s ‘Pay-as-you-go” model gives businesses the opportunity to rapidly scale up or down their demand based on current business needs, thereby saving time and costs.
Future Proofing: Some providers offer open source cloud platforms thereby creating a continuous innovating cloud automation. (E.g. Microsoft Azure)
Security, compatibility and legal requirements are also part of the cloud environment, and are very business specific in nature. It is up to each organization to manage its own set of challenges and requirements with regards to the cloud. But challenges are an inherent part of any new arena, and shouldn’t deter enterprises from taking on the benefits offered by the cloud.
Cloud Deployment Models:Private, Public or Hybrid
One of the first things to address while deciding to migrate to the cloud is whether to go with Private, Public or Hybrid deployment. This decision depends on the kind of enterprise (data sensitive or not), enterprise size, resources and the kind of data and processes, whether critical or non-critical which are being co-located to the cloud.
Private Cloud: Retaining Security & Control
The private cloud is also often referred to as the internal/enterprise cloud. Your organization will have its own dedicated hardware, running on your private network, and located on or off premises and managed by either your team or third-party providers. Such deployment involves significant Capex investment, and allows for greater control and security.
Companies with existing data centers may find this type of cloud deployment beneficial seeing as they already have the required infrastructure in place.
Public Cloud: Shift from Capex to Opex
The public cloud provides services over a network that is not your private one and is open for others to use. The public cloud business model creates a stage for businesses to be more agile, and the ‘do-on-demand’ benefit removes the need for businesses to plan for computational requirements and infrastructure.
This kind of cloud model is usually off-site and provides the benefit of reduced lead times for the testing and deployment of new products. Such deployment is economical because of pay-per-usage billing model that could result in decreased capital overheads and operational costs once it efficiently shares resources among various customers.
Hybrid Cloud: Best of all worlds
The hybrid cloud provides enterprises with a best of all worlds environment. The hybrid cloud is great for an enterprise looking to retain critical processes with itself, while at the same time shift non-critical ones onto the public cloud to enjoy benefits of scalability, elasticity and reach.
Hybrid cloud proves to be cost effective in a variety of scenarios
- Keeping critical workloads on premises in own data center, while shifting non-critical processes and data to the public cloud.
- Additional computing requirements and storage may be rented as per needs, cutting down on the need to maintain a dedicated staff. Peaks, slumps and temporary requirements can be handles by utilizing the public cloud
Cloud Deployment Strategy
The Cloud environment is a field where you can experiment with multiple permutations and combinations based on business requirements, available revenue and workforce.
With a variety of tantalizing cloud plans up on offer by providers, how does a firm choose one that is flexible enough to co-locate all of its workloads and processes?
This decision requires businesses to undergo a number of steps:
- Deciding on the size and type of workloads to be co-located
- Whether to go with a single vendor or multiple vendor approach. While choosing a single vendor, businesses must see whether the provider’s vision aligns with its own and the provider’s is dedicated to innovation and its capacity is flexible with respect to current workload requirements as well as future.
Many firms undergo a multiple vendor approach where they place different workloads and processes with different vendors in order to optimize costs.
- Deciding on cloud management software to seamlessly manage the different cloud environments. Providers like Cloudyn offer solutions to manage multiple cloud deployments.
To sum it up, enterprises should take note of the wise advice offered by Mitesh Agarwal, mentor at the Oracle Start-up Cloud Accelerator Programme, “Your dexterity in designing a future-proof cloud strategy and due diligence in choosing the right cloud partner are vital steps for your long-term success”.
