Using the cloud is essential for just about any business these days, and the bigger a business gets, the more important it becomes to choose a cloud solution that works best for your operational requirements.
Public
For small businesses, running an internal datacentre – known as a “private cloud” – is expensive thanks to hardware, staffing and maintenance costs, which is why using the public cloud makes far more sense.
The public cloud allows businesses to choose the services they want from the smorgasbord that’s on offer from a host of big-name tech companies like DropBox, Google, Microsoft, Sage and more, pay just for what they need, and use that cutting-edge cloud tech to achieve business objectives while still sticking to a tight budget and appropriate timelines.
Using the public cloud like this means a low – and predictable – total cost of ownership and a shift from capex to opex, all major wins for any business.
Private
Bigger enterprises are more inclined toward private cloud, which they can manage and maintain themselves according to their own objectives. Owning the hardware gives them granular control over how and by whom that private cloud is used, as well as the option to do with their data whatever they choose.
The major disadvantage of the private cloud is the large costs incurred – hosting one’s own datacentre is no cheap endeavour – and the potential to not be maximising ROI. Not using said datacentre to its full potential while it continues to cost a lot of money just to run is a very real risk that CIOs need to keep in mind.
Hybrid
But humans are nothing if not creative: today, it’s entirely feasible to run a mix of private and public cloud solutions, each suited to a specific task or workload, and reap the benefits of each.
This is called the “hybrid cloud” approach. It gives businesses the granular control they need over their datacentres, while also allowing them to use public cloud services that fill a specific need without spending money on their own hardware to host it on. That way, they can spend what they are prepared to, while simultaneously making use of those cloud services they have deemed to provide genuine business value.
For instance, a business that requires a lot of storage capacity that needs to be accessible via the internet has two options: they can either provision their own storage hardware and place it in their datacentre at a rather large time, staffing and monetary cost, or they can sign up with a cloud-based storage provider with a credit card and a few mouse clicks.
A further advantage of choosing the public cloud in that scenario is that businesses avoid having to guess how much physical hardware they will need to supply and support, and can instead provision additional storage when they need it by clicking on a few options.
Easy integration
Best of all, public cloud services are structured in such a way that they can easily integrate into existing datacentre setups, making a hybrid solution a doable, affordable and smart way to go.
For more information on the cloud options available from Tarsus Technologies, contact one of our Tarsus on Demand representatives for a comprehensive outline of the services we offer.
