There was a time, not so long ago, when your friendly neighborhood CIO would have been appalled at the thought of moving a company’s data, file storage, and applications to someone else’s servers in someone else’s data center. What if the network connection goes down? What if their data center gets hit by an earthquake? What if they have a security breach? What if… What if… What if…
The safest place for these resources, the thinking went, was within the company’s “four walls.” Never mind that any of those catastrophes can also occur in one’s own data center.
Happily, these fears have been allayed by advances in cloud computing technology, and most CIOs have come to appreciate the many advantages of the cloud environment.
Cloud Computing Advantages
The major advantages of cloud computing include:
- Flexibility, scalability, and ease of use: Cloud computing offers flexibility and scalability that are just not available in an on-premise data center. Do you need to spin up a new application server for testing? Done, to your exact specifications, with a few clicks and with no need to purchase or deploy additional hardware. Do you need resources (memory, storage, CPU cores) that scale up and down in response to demand? Done–automatically.
- Reliability: Most cloud hosting providers have multiple data centers across multiple geographies, and your environment can be replicated so that a hardware failure or disaster affecting one of their data centers won’t impact your operations. And all cloud hosting providers offer multiple high-availability configuration options.
- Security: Security in the cloud is still your problem–it’s not usually provided by default by the hosting provider–but you have more advanced options available. And you can always encrypt sensitive data in the cloud, both in storage and in transit, so even a “bad actor” employed by the hosting provider can’t access your data.
- Cost: Cloud computing reduces or eliminates hardware costs and the costs of operating and maintaining a local data center. And in most cases you pay for only the cloud resources you actually use.
Cloud Hosting Options
Having accepted the value proposition of cloud computing, the question becomes, “which hosting option is the right one for my business?”
The basic options are:
- Single cloud provider: With this option, you migrate all of your IT environment to a single cloud provider, such as Microsoft Azure. Data, file storage, applications, web presence, and even network infrastructure can be migrated to Azure.
- Hybrid cloud: This option involves selectively moving some of your traditional on-premise resources to the Azure Cloud to benefit from both Cloud and On-Prem capabilities.
Which hosting option you choose depends on many factors, such as your specific computing needs, expected growth in those needs, and others.
How to Choose?
Migrating your IT environment to the cloud is not a complex undertaking but it does require familiarity with cloud-specific terminology and technologies, as well as the forethought to see the bigger picture and long-term goals. At 360 Visibility, we are experts in cloud computing and how to set up a cloud environment to fulfill your organization’s specific present and future needs, while placing a keen eye on security, ease of use, and growth. We can analyze your business requirements and design a single-provider Azure environment or a hybrid cloud setup to provide maximum benefit and value.
If you know that cloud computing is right for your organization, but aren’t sure where to start, contact 360 Visibility today to learn how we can guide you to the right cloud environment.
