Moving to the Cloud: Technology Enablement for Enterprises

Cloud computing is a common practice today and there are many providers who offer cloud enablement solutions and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). While moving to a cloud is an easy decision to take, answering where the physical infrastructure is, how it is accessed etc can help you adopt the best deployment models that will drive your business forward. Otherwise, it is often confusing to choose from the various options available today.

Lets take a look at the common ones and determine how they are characterised for different infrastructure

Public Cloud

In public clouds, the end users do not own the physical infrastructure and it is hosted at the vendor's premises. Also, although the customer has no visibility, the data center is run and controlled virtually through simple web interface consoles with which he can manage storage and resources.

Public clouds are flexible, elastic and reliable. Their capacity can be increased within minutes and there is quality of service (QoS). The network in the public cloud is not dedicated to any single user, it is a group of pooled resources from which each user chooses what he needs. Each client is given an account in the public cloud, through which they can run their applications as per the requirement.

Hence public clouds are suitable mainly for limited budget enterprises who need quick deployment. They are comparatively fast and a cheaper solution to cloud deployment considering the maintenance of the data center is not something that you will need to worry about.

Private Cloud

A private cloud is setup in the external or internal premises and managed by the organization itself (or a third party by choice) whilst they can setup their own dedicated network. Due to exclusivity and flexibility, this deployment model is considered more secure, private and scalable.

Private clouds are usually used by large enterprises who require large amount of resources for setting up a better platform. To set up private clouds, data centers are bought and virtualization technologies are implemented in them in order to enable an exclusive private virtual space for an enterprise. Highly critical applications which require constant monitoring and special maintenance like firewall, security measures, etc are run on private clouds since they need to be tweaked to meet the specific requirements.

On the basis of hosting they are classified into externally hosted and on-premise clouds. Clouds hosted by a third party provider outside the user's physical premises are called externally hosted clouds, whereas when the cloud is provided to the user inside his company's physical premises, it is an on-premise private cloud.

Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid clouds are set up connecting the in-house infrastructure with the local network, along with advanced firewall protection, load-balancers, etc and have a high rate of security. Every organization experiences a sudden peak in their load and which causes their network to go haywire. This is an occasional condition when there are unexpected rise in demands and needs to be provided with a solution that can be used only when necessary. This is where hybrid clouds prove beneficial.

Hybrid clouds are considered the most secure deployment models, primarily due to their location. They are set up inside the infrastructure, which makes data archival very easy. It basically acts as a cache to the infrastructure, and data can be cached locally and later be trickled up to the cloud provider. In case of an emergency full-system recovery, the saved data just needs to be copied from the local system to the cloud provider, and thus it also handles restores easily. Hybrid clouds take the best features from public and private clouds, tweak them a little higher, and add value to their service. For example, content syndication is a possible option in public clouds, which you cannot use if you implement a private cloud. Similarly, other beneficial features like easier data archival, faster disaster recovery options, QoS optimization and more. The hybrid clouds are secure and scalable and also interoperable. This model is highly advanced yet simplified and reliable.

So which one should you go for?

The decision as to which cloud you should choose depends on what type of business you own and what your requirements are. We have seen the different types, listed their features and their advantages.

Public clouds, like the AWS, are used for short term solutions which do not require high-end security options. These are helpful when you need quick solutions on a limited budget and do not have maintenance facilities.

To set up your own private clouds, solutions like vmware etc, are used with which large datacenters can be used to for the enterprises' growth and development.

Hybrids clouds are gaining prominence among large enterprises and are the most preferred of the lot due to their flexibility and high security. They keep critical information close, and safe. Their rapid elasticity helps in expansion and downsizing of resources as per demand.

To determine the most suitable cloud for your business seek assistance from expert consultants who can help you in choosing the best cloud solution for your business, show you all the available options, help you set up the cloud and multiply your profits within no time.

Boost Your Business Productivity With a Focused Approach

Undeniably, the latest technological innovations, including the cloud, mobile, and big data have transformed the way we execute our business chores. In tandem to these advancements, potential opportunities have also ascended that are consistently meeting their prioritized needs while boosting a higher customer satisfaction level.

Precisely, complexities linked with conventional IT systems were the major obstacle to right decision-making and innovation, but the arrival of the cloud has undeniably helped in overcoming all such difficulties. The three known cloud models - public, private and hybrid cloud - are speeding up the pace of application/information transactions.

Opt for a Robust Strategy to Leverage Market Opportunities

CEOs are considering the cloud to gain operational excellence while slashing redundant expenses. Well, the operational proficiency and promises of business agility linked with the cloud has the potential to improve the functionality of organizations. For all these reasons, organizations are looking forward to move their applications to cloud-based platform, backed by an adept app-centric methodology.

Among all the cloud models, the hybrid cloud is the most preferred choice of CEOs. This is what the current market situation and researchers predicts.

According to the Right Scale 2015 State of the Cloud Report, 'approximately 82% of businesses have a hybrid cloud hosting solution' 74 percent up the level of 2014.

Significance of Hybrid Strategy

This strategy enables businesses to gain control over their deployed cloud applications without sacrificing on network availability, performance and security services across the complete hybrid environment. It also provides some of the important services in order to ensure your apps remain seamlessly available and stay protected across the entire hybrid environment. This, in turn, allows IT administrators to quash unwanted risks while catering to security essentials both on-premises and in the cloud.

According to one of the studies conducted by a leading research institution, 'a majority of companies (both big and small) have identified the ability to set and impose stringent cloud security policies as the best method to shut down the cloud security gap'.

Moreover, it enables companies across all verticals to confidently provide the critical delivery services for their critical applications irrespective of the fact where they are deployed or what cloud platform they are making use of.

The other major benefit of this strategy is it gives you a quick insight of legacy environments and software-defined architectures and increases interoperability between the same. On the top of it, managing incongruent, multi-cloud environments become quite easy.

Alternative Cloud Models

In the previous installment of this article, the two fundamental models of cloud computing, private and public clouds, were described. The following installment introduces two further variations on these models which can be used to add flexibility to an organisation's IT infrastructure, the hybrid and the community cloud models.

Community Cloud

A community cloud model describes a scenario in which a number of organisations with similar IT demands club together to use the same cloud infrastructure. They are particularly appropriate where the organisations perform similar functions and therefore require the same configurations, especially in relation to security and compliance. In essence it is a half-way house between the private and public cloud models.

The model is similar to that of a private cloud in that it is a ring fenced platform which ensures greater levels of security than the public cloud offers and it can also be hosted internally by the constituent organisations to ensure greater ownership and control (at the expense of some cost savings). However, because it has multiple clients (usually a small number) it also provides economies of scale which are missing in private clouds and therefore greater cost savings than the individual equivalents. Furthermore, in common with a public cloud model, organisations can take advantage of pay as you go pricing structures.

Hybrid Cloud

The hybrid model of cloud computing is also somewhat self explanatory in that it is used to describe any configuration which utilises a combination of the public and private cloud computing models, or indeed a combination involving community cloud models. It comes under the slightly broader categorisation of hybrid IT - that is an IT platform which integrates a mixture of internal and external networks and services so that the resource being used can provide the maximum benefit for each business function.

https://www1.asiapac.com.sg/solutions/cloud-consultancy/Hybrid cloud models can therefore give an organisation access to the differing benefits of public and private models, primarily cost/scalability and security respectively, as and when they need them by integrating the different models for the different functions within the organisation. For example, a business that processes and stores sensitive data may do so on a private cloud platform to ensure that it is secure whilst also taking advantage of the scalability of a virtualised environment. It may then use integrated public cloud services for all of the less sensitive functions, such as project planning, in order to benefit from the considerable costs savings and scalability that that can bring.

A hybrid cloud set-up, like hybrid cloud hosting, can be constructed in a couple of ways: either by providers of each model of cloud computing teaming up to provide a hybrid platform which organisations can sign up to to perform their differing IT functions; or by an organisation managing their own internal private cloud or other IT infrastructure and then signing up to an integrated external public cloud service where they can, to handle their non data sensitive functions.

Whatever a client's computing needs, there will be a cloud based service to meet their demand and provide that client with the benefits of virtualisation and utility style computing; including responsive on-demand scalability, cost efficiencies (including pay as you go and free services) and redundancy. By becoming aware of the potential of using public, private and community clouds as well as the hybrid models which combine and maximise the benefits of each, organisations can ensure that they keep their IT operations as efficient, productive and secure as possible.

Why Are Enterprise Organizations Virtualizing Mission-Critical Applications in the Public Cloud?

In the last few years a growing number of larger corporations and multinationals have moved a substantial percentage of tier two applications to the public cloud. The pay-as-you-go model of usage-based pricing provides an elasticity that is extremely cost-effective. This savings that the scalability and multi-tenancy of public cloud computing provide, is the main draw for all organizations to outsource to cloud hosting, and a driving force for the virtualization of tier one applications.

For enterprise organizations, the initial move to the public cloud has been a testing of the waters, and rightfully so. As the cloud has become a more well-defined environment, enterprise organizations are taking advantage of what public cloud hosting has to offer their mission-critical applications. In part due to a better understanding of security and more manageable hybrid cloud solutions, larger corporations are looking beyond the private cloud for tier one business solutions. The articles in this series will explore hybrid and public cloud computing today, and what they provide for multinationals as well as smaller companies.

Some organizations benefit from utilizing cloud hosting for business needs as simple as a software as a service (SaaS), while others eventually migrate to a complete outsourcing via infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Bookkeeping businesses for example are taking advantage of new QuickBooks hosting services that provide all of the advantages of cloud computing and a significant step up from QuickBooks online. While this is an example of SaaS, it is also an example of small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) outsourcing mission-critical applications. For enterprise organizations to make the move to a public or hybrid cloud environment with tier one applications though, a few developments needed to take place.

Cloud service providers (CSPs) needed to be able to offer enterprise-grade security or better. As a few years have passed, it is now easier for the upper echelon of CSPs to demonstrate the superior security measures in place. With the government opening up the doors for private companies to offer cloud hosting to state and federal institutions this past year, security issues for big businesses have shifted from "why" to "why not?" After several federally funded studies cited that most CSPs were providing security that is equal to or better than current agency requirements, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) was developed to provide a standardized approach for government agencies to work with CSPs. This went a long way towards alleviating any security concerns regarding the public cloud in the private sector.

Hybrid cloud management needed to be a negligible aspect to hybrid cloud computing. Not too long ago it required hefty IT expertise to deal with hybrid cloud management on the user end, and they weren't even responsible for the majority of the workload. With VMware vCloud Connector, more of the responsibilities and control have shifted to the end-user administrators with a sleek application that makes the management of virtual machines (VMs) in a hybrid environment much easier and less time-consuming. This is an important development for many reasons. For enterprise organizations that want to take the next step in outsourcing the virtualization of mission-critical applications, yet are still a bit wary of a permanent move to the public cloud, a hybrid cloud solution is the next logical step. The time-consuming maintenance and lack of control used to be an issue. This is no longer the case. With vCloud Connector, in-house administrators can manage VMs back and forth in the hybrid cloud with ease. This provides the opportunity for corporations to work on sensitive projects with third parties as well as get an idea of how cost-effective the scalability of the public cloud could be for the entire enterprise.

The security issues of storing data across multiple countries in multiple data centers on multiple machines needed to outweigh the security issues of consolidating data in the public cloud. This has actually always been the case, just not perceived that way by most until recently. For multinationals and other global enterprise organizations, the constantly shifting political tides in the multitude of less-than-stable countries around the world can wreak havoc on foreign data center access and security. Not to mention anything less than first world power grids. Having access to data from anywhere in the world via the public cloud is actually about risk avoidance, by eliminating global factors. This change in perception is one of the key reasons for moving tier one applications to the public cloud.

As cloud hosting is becoming an increasingly attractive option for enterprise organizations and their mission-critical applications, it is important for CSPs to express clearly what the advantages are, and also what some of the possible difficulties in outsourcing cloud computing can be. In the next article we will explore potential obstacles, and what enterprise organizations should expect from CSP security and services, as well as a more detailed explanation of the prominent advantages of hybrid and public cloud hosting.

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