How to Choose the Right Cloud Environment

If there’s a thing everybody agrees upon when it comes to cloud migrations, is that there are a lot of choices to be made when you decide you are going to move to the cloud. With all the noise around the topic it can be difficult to make the right choices, especially related to the cloud environment that is the best fit for your company.

To determine the best cloud environment, criteria like organization’s size, type of data to be stored and other business needs will help you make your decisions. Every type of cloud environment comes with its advantages and disadvantages and each one of them might be a great fit..

Let’s quickly review those aspects that can help you make a better decision!

1. The Public Cloud

In the public cloud the services and infrastructure are provided off-site over the Internet.

Advantages

• It has the greatest level of efficiency in shared resources
• It offers on demand provisioning with no CAPEX involved
• It provides the ability to add computer capacity for peak times

Disadvantages

• Concerns about data privacy, security and reliability

 Ideal when:

• You’re dealing with SaaS applications from a vendor who has a implemented strong security strategy
• You’re a small or mid-sized business dealing with standardized workload for applications used by lots of people, such as e-mail
• You’re managing software development projects using a PaaS offering cloud
• You are leveraging a well known IaaS provider that offers a high SLA and a geographic failover solution.

2. The Private Cloud

In the private cloud the services and infrastructure are managed on a private network inside your company’s firewall.

 Advantages

• Great level of security and control
• Scale that meets your business demands
• Delivers more control over the underlying hardware.

Disadvantages

• The company needs to purchase and maintain all the software and infrastructure, which reduces the cost savings.

 Ideal when:

• Control, data privacy and security are critical for your business;
• Your organization is large enough to run a next generation cloud data center on its own.

3. The Hybrid Cloud

 The hybrid cloud includes a variety of public and private options with multiple providers. Basically, the hybrid cloud is a combination of two or more deployment models.

Advantages

• You can keep each aspect of your business in the most efficient environment possible
• Saves the extra cost of purchasing exclusive server hardware
• Designed to quickly scale the company’s needs

Disadvantages

• You have to keep track of multiple different security platforms and make sure that all parts of your business can communicate with each other

Ideal when:

• Your company offers services that are tailored for different vertical markets.
• You are a large organization that has the capability to handle the majority of its long term needs within its own private clouds, but also has short-term ones, just in time needs which can be handled in a public cloud.

As I was saying at the beginning, things are not always black and white, especially when the lines between private and public clouds are blurred. As you probably already observed some public cloud companies are now offering private versions of their public clouds, while some companies that only offered private cloud technologies are now offering public versions of the same capabilities. Careful planning and great awareness to your business needs are critical for success.

I hope that the aspects highlighted above will help you make a good call concerning the cloud environment to migrate to. What other aspects of this process do you find to be challenging?

Photo source: kevin dooley