Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Is it really “The Cloud way or The Highway”?


IT experts, analysts, industry leaders and everyone around, talks about Cloud Computing today. Everyone admits that we need to include Cloud, in our existing system. But the question is how and what to use.

Which Cloud to use

You might know that there are two types of Cloud - Public and Private. A public cloud will be like the services of Amazon, Microsoft, Google or Salesforce, that will drive the costs down and relieve you of the burden of managing resources, but at a cost of losing control over them. Whereas a private cloud will be built using an enterprise’s own resources in the datacenter, and will reside within the enterprise’s firewall, and one will have to manage the whole resource while enjoying full control over them.
While thinking of making a choice between these two adoptions, approaches a third option of hybrid cloud, which harnesses some of the features of both private as well as public cloud.

Enterprise’s choice: Private cloud

Any large organization would have a clear choice of adopting a private cloud, as they would not want to compromise on the critical security policies involving data. The main benefit of private cloud over public cloud that an enterprise sees is that - within a private cloud, all services including data and processes will be managed by the organization, without restriction of network, bandwidth or security.

Everyone’s choice: Public cloud

Cloud service providers like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce etc., are all in an endeavour to offer a one-stop shop for all IT needs for any particular organization by providing those as services on the public cloud. The cloud service provider takes care of deploying, managing and securing the infrastructure and the organizations can consume them on-demand, with a pay-for-what-you-use model.
Adopting a public cloud makes more sense to smaller organizations that cant invest upfront on hardware and licensing of business productivity solutions. Such organizations can opt for cloud services offers ranging from business apps to having a server on the cloud.
Cloud computing is really an efficient technique for hosts to supply services like data storage and other hosting related services. The market is dominated by big players; However, the growing demand for cloud and cloud based services, leaves enough and more room for small players to reap the benefit of a consolidated cloud model of service…
It is indeed heading to “The Cloud way or the Highway”