Deciding Which Cloud to Use
Many large and mid-size companies can save just as much or more with internal servers for their computing needs than they can with a cloud platform. That’s wisdom from Alan Ganek, chief technology officer and vice president of strategy and technology at IBM’s Software Group, in a recent article I read in PCWorld.
Meanwhile, enterprises with thousands of servers are more likely to maximize savings by building a private cloud or a hybrid public/private cloud. For example, cloud services offer such advantages as:
- a variable cost structure that eliminates the need for up-front capital expenses
- the ability to scale up or down the amount of servers required for an application.
Despite these general bits of wisdom, each company must decide which applications and workloads can be outsourced and which ones need to be kept in-house. It’s a highly personal decision, and firms need to take into account not only cost savings, but also risk factors and compliance requirements.
Overall, the most suitable outsourcing workloads for an external cloud are infrastructure workloads, including desktop and communications tools, said Ganek in the article. Meanwhile, database and application-oriented workloads are best suited for private clouds.
Ganek gave an example of how a company can break down what belongs where. He cited the example of IBM client Panasonic, which uses LotusLive, IBM’s hosted e-mail and collaboration service, rather than an in-house system.
“I’m sure that Panasonic has the scale to deploy private clouds, and I have every expectation that they will deploy private clouds for certain aspects of their business, but then you look at the specific challenge they faced with their collaboration tools — the fact that their 300,000 employees are scattered all over the world and the fact their starting place had many different regional implementations — using the IBM LotusLive cloud was very natural for them,” Ganek said.
I found this very revealing – especially taking a look at how one company decided what to keep inside and what to farm out. No matter what type of cloud your company builds or whether you opt to do your computing via internal servers that house apps, it’s essential that you set up some type of system of automated monitoring so that you keep computing running smoothly and be kept in the loop regarding potential problems.