Which cloud is best?

The numbers reported for the expanding use of all Cloud services today is staggering. Gartner shows public cloud spend exploding from $91B in 2011 to  $227B in 2019. 451 Research forecasted 90% of organizations using some type of cloud service and 60% of workloads running in some sort of hosted cloud service. The private cloud services market is expected to grow by over $49B from 2020 to 2024. Since the earliest Cloud implementations, the benefits have been consistent across all industries:

• Flexibility: Scale up and down according to business requirements.
• Operating expense vs capital expense: Convert some IT spend to a pay-as-you-go model thereby minimizing CapEx costs and reaping bottom-line benefits.
• Competitive agility: Innovative enterprise grade technologies immediately available to businesses of all sizes and levels of maturity.
• Security and Compliance: choose a provider that offers certified compliance levels proven to meet your business requirements. Security, Cloud? Yes! Security in the cloud is so robust today that Gartner predicts the public cloud as an infrastructure workload will suffer at least 60% fewer security incidents than those in traditional data centers.
• Anytime, anywhere; collaborative workspaces, universal storage, file-sharing and survivable global access to critical business applications.

Selecting the Right Type of Cloud

After answering the important questions about cloud business benefits, security, and survivability, the most important question becomes which cloud do I need?

Public Cloud

• Require flexibility to expand or reduce resources in reaction to needs of the application, process, or business itself. Business is OK with a multi-tenant infrastructure for these specific cloud services.
• Remote access provided to non-regulated resources, data, or applications.
• Seeking to reduce the cost of infrastructure, IT monitoring and maintenance.
• Want inherent physical, process and platform redundancy.
• Need maximum uptime (SLA protected) and minimized risk of failure.
• Seeking ease of integration with platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) capabilities which are typically native to the public cloud.

Private Cloud

• Require a standards-based and compliance regulated environment.
• Have sensitive data and record storage requirements.
• Require single point of control and security for IT workloads and the underlying infrastructure.
• Businesses with complex or compliance-based IT requirements that have under-staffed or under-skilled IT teams.
• Need resources to be available on-demand but have internal or governance requirements that prohibit the use of public cloud resources.

Hybrid Cloud

• Blended use of public cloud and private cloud.
• Requirement to manage workloads across private and public cloud via a single interface.
• Ability to share and burst resources across multiple cloud environments.
• Desire to incorporate and manage cloud-native applications into portfolio of existing business resident applications.
• Have a centralized identity structure that can be used across multiple environments.
• First step in the evolution to a highly efficient, cloud based and orchestrated runtime environment for applications. Application or process requirements are abstracted and optimized before resources are allocated (orchestrated and policy based) from any existing private or public cloud source.

Multi-cloud

• Incorporates the use of multiple public or private clouds and can include use of existing physical and virtual infrastructure.
• Individual cloud resources are sized for and dedicated to specific processes and applications with no cross-cloud sharing of resources (e.g. compute, storage)
• Delivers an improved risk profile via the use of separate cloud services or resources per application or process.
• Multi-cloud is sometimes the result of separate or siloed cloud strategies for separate groups in the same business. This situation typically reduces the economic efficiencies gained from the use of Cloud.

A Few More Important Considerations

While economic and compliance requirements play a significant role in decisions regarding the type of cloud the business chooses, there are a couple of factors that need to be assured to provide top operational efficiency and achieve the desired benefits. 1.) Is the application built for the cloud? Assure the application is built to use cloud-native resources. 2.) Are the CPU, memory, and storage requirements for each application or process an exact match to the cloud services you are purchasing? 3.) Are monitoring capabilities adequate to evaluate network or application performance problems before they contribute to a design-based failure?

Prioritize Cloud Compatibility

 In any cloud solution your security products, tools and services for each environment (which are likely to be different) must cooperate with each other. As you map out your Cloud solution, be thorough and assure compatibility between all clouds so you get the maximum protection for your data. Ultimately, any cloud solution is as secure as you make it. Pay attention to the key areas for potential exposure and vulnerability. Addressing them upfront will help your organization not only stay secure, but also realize the full potential and benefits that a cloud solution offers; whichever cloud that may be. Interested in learning more about cloud design, architecture and security? Contact our cloud experts today or call (877) 740-5028.

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What is a Hybrid Cloud? See how combining the advantages of the public and private cloud allows you to have the best of both worlds with a scalable, cost-effective hybrid cloud. (Watch video)

Four Security Considerations for your Hybrid Cloud Most enterprises today have a multi-cloud environment and more than half have a hybrid cloud strategy, combining both public and private clouds. The continued migration to hybrid cloud validates its clear advantages. (Read more)