Which cloud direction to go?

Someone is taking the journey into Cloud, is starting from the Crossroad formed by Private and Public Cloud paths. First question would be which way to go. Moving in public or private or maybe using a hybrid model.

Let us first understand what each of the above terms means;

Private Cloud: It is residing within an Enterprise’s intranet. The biggest advantage of this direction is all data will be protected behind the firewall and under the security processes and control a company has. Hence there is a great advantage in terms of security.

However they are also some disadvantages along with these good news. Below are some;

i./ High Maintenance costs: Support, Cooling, Rental are some indicative costs under this category.

ii./ Management of Infrastructure: People will be required for managing the private cloud infrastructure. In addition to this investment should be dedicated for educational purposes

iii./ Keep infrastructure Updated: Servers, Storages, network equipment etc. at some point of time would need to be replaced either because they will be considered as legacy or due growth purposes.

Public Cloud: Services residing into public, they are residing into Service Providers Data Centers. They are a number of Public Cloud Providers in the Market most important are;

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Adobe, VMware, IBM Cloud, Rackspace, Red Hat, Salesforce, Oracle Cloud, SAP, Verizon Cloud, Navisite, Dropbox, Egnyte etc.

The main advantage for this kind of Cloud for an Enterprise is that there is no longer responsible for any management of service. As service data are residing in Public Cloud Service Vendor, the responsibility will moved into vendor’s side. In addition to this advantage we need to take into account as well, there is no need for wasting time and investment for testing a service.

However there are a number of drawbacks as well;

i./ Security: An enterprise has no control over the security practices of the public cloud vendor, hence there is always a question mark on how secure data is although rarely have been reported such a kind of breaches.

ii./ Unpredictable Service Costs: In its Stratecast Predictions 2018, Frost & Sullivan noted that 53% of IT leaders surveyed cited “managing costs to run cloud workloads” as a huge obstacle, and over 50% have difficulty justifying the expenses of some public cloud workloads. F&S predicted that cloud providers will address the issue “by consolidating and simplifying their own pricing tiers to enable users to better predict and compare costs.” 

Hybrid Cloud: Is the combination of private and public cloud. Depending on the service Enterprise Senior Management can decide if it can either run in the intranet (Internal Data Center) or moved into the public cloud. This decision making it is not an easy task as they are a number of factors need to be taken into account. E.g. how sensitive are the workloads in terms of security? , What is the OS is needed for running a service?, What are the service dependencies? Etc.

How to determine which workloads are suitable for Public Cloud and which for Private?

Cloud Strategy for an Enterprise it is not an easy task as they are a number of factors needed to be taken into account, before deciding which direction to go.

A successful journey in Cloud world should start by assessing what can be moved into cloud and identify what is the right approach for those workloads.

Cloud Experts have the tools and the know-how for accelerating your journey.

In case you need to discuss your business needs please feel free to contact me.

Sources:

Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/11/16/the-truth-about-cloud-pricing/#1d953f122f33

LIFTR https://liftrinsights.com/2018-year-cloud-pricing-gets-simplified/