Cloud conversations can go many different ways. It is, after all, a fairly wide open and eclectic topic. As part of my blog this week, I will explain how I approach PUBLIC IAAS cloud from a consultative approach.
Of course, there are positives and negatives to public cloud IAAS. Spending some time on the positives is fairly easy. You have probably heard them all before.
- Expand and deflate your resources like a balloon
- Risk transfer in some cases - i.e. Let's push the risk of securing and backing up my email to O365.
- In many cases, the startup costs for a small organization can be less
- Accessibility is generally improved in public cloud
- Who do you think has the larger budget to build better security/redundancy? You or Microsoft?
The above reasons are all good and valid reasons of course. Why wouldn't you make the move to public cloud? Well from our standpoint, there are many negative aspects of going fully public. Read on....
At Cyber, we truly believe in a hybrid model. We believe in practicing safe cloud. In order to understand what we mean by this, please take a look at some of the concerns we have with companies that lean towards running all of their IT infrastructure in a public cloud.
- Applications - Running your infrastructure as a service gives you redundant infrastructure - but that is typically all. This doesn't mean that your specific applications are redundant. Most apps run on a structured database, and will require this to be redundant as well. You must test this functionality with every application. This is fairly hard in a public cloud environment. Isn't it really about the applications anyways?
- Costs - We are still to this day trying to find the public cloud model of IAAS a less expensive overall solution. One customer of mine (who brought his infrastructure back on premise a year ago) actually told me he is sick of paying for someone else's datacenter.
- Egress Data - Be careful here. Most providers allow you to push data to them with no fees to transmit. Most charge you significantly for pulling your data back from them.
- Black Friday - I use this term to explain a scenerio that I have seen happen. A customer ran their infrastructure on a public cloud for their customer facing application. A wide spread outage caused the cloud provider to turn on resources for their top customers first. They literally ran out of resources for some of their smaller customers and they couldn't get access to their servers.
A good hybrid solution can solve many of these problems. Companies like Dell are now providing their customers with "appliance" like hybrid solutions that give them on premise systems that look, feel, charge back, provision, and even manage like a cloud. One example is the new Dell Hybrid Cloud Solution. This solution ties in to Microsoft Azure so you can spill over, backup, replicate, and maintain your on premise systems just like you would with Azure public cloud.
If you would like any more information about this topic, please don't hesitate to contact me.