There is a lot of buzz around cloud services getting all that you need on the shelf without actually buying it. You can host your servers, applications and development tools—everything out of your own data center. It seems cloud will make life simpler for many IT people. Depending on your requirements, you can opt for infrastructure, platform or software as a service and develop, and host your applications accordingly. You do not need to even invest time and resources on building your own data center and going through long evaluation and purchase process. Instead, you pay as you use the services available on cloud.
Big questions
Before moving on to using cloud services, it is important for you to understand for which applications would it be good to use the cloud services and for which you should not use the cloud services. You need to first decide which piece of your IT is your core competency. Ask yourself questions like—is your system a secret weapon in your market competition with others. In other words, does IT give your business competitive advantages in increasing sales, lowering costs, or creating good-will in the community? In short, is your business highly dependent on this IT application? Will you lose big money when the system is offline? What is the impact of being offline both for your internal customers i.e. users within the organization and external customers whose services and satisfaction levels are being compromised? Can you afford your system being breached—illegal access, data corruption, and data stolen by malicious hackers? This could lead to cash losses and direct legal consequences in the short term, as well as loss of customer trust in the long term. Will you have enough control of your systems to fulfill different business unit needs? IT systems have to support the growth of the business. Do you need to have control of the systems in terms of software configurations, maintenance, support, SLAs, and so forth? The last thing you want is to have your system become a hurdle of your growth. Basically you should avoid the cloud for your organization’s core competency IT systems. For your core competency systems, you should choose to have more control over your systems and applications. Cloud computing is not a silver bullet for everything. So, then what are the applications where you should use cloud services? There could be many cases in which you can use cloud services:
Where to deploy
Generally you outsource what you most likely don’t think is a core competency to your business. You can then leverage the full benefit that public cloud services bring to you. You can easily have workspace that is accessible by both your employees and contractors, and it’s more secure than opening up your own infrastructure to your contractors.
You want to try something new and don’t want to be limited by capital budget not available for infrastructure experiments. From the moment you start a pilot project, you don’t know whether it will work or not and you don’t have extra infrastructure with you to help in this pilot. It’s natural to “rent” the required infrastructures from service providers. This is especially true for pilot projects that require buying lots of machines that you can’t repurpose if the pilot project falls through.
These are the projects that run for a short period of time, and it doesn’t make sense to buy the infrastructure. It’s like renting furniture instead of buying them for staging your house when you want to sell it. When your house is sold, you can ask the staging company to remove the furniture. You pay based on the furniture and the total time of renting, exactly the same idea as cloud services.
You may have a pre-sales event or a training class in which you want a full demo for a week. These are perfect use cases for leveraging cloud computing.
Notice that I said dramatic, not dynamic workloads. Not every application has a steady workload pattern over time. Some applications could experience 100 times more workloads during peak time than otherwise. For example, a website which may need 1,000 servers for uploading photos during the weekend of a popular sports event might only require a handful the rest of the time. It is highly doubtful that you would invest in buying 1,000 servers that are used for one weekend in a year? That is a perfect use case for cloud services.
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