Other than a vague feeling that cloud computing is the future, do you really know why your next server should be cloud-based? Sure, it is meant to make your infrastructure resilient to Famine, War, Death and Conquest or something like that, but how does that work? Maybe you’re not asking the right questions…
Let’s address the elephant in the room first: cloud computing only works if you have good connectivity. Then again, how well would your business work, as it is now, if your connectivity was turned right down or switched off? Connectivity is at the core of most modern business practices in any case, so taking this next step is not really quite such a big thing from that point of view. Imagine, if whilst digging up the road outside your offices, the council severs your digital connection to the outside world, you can just up-sticks and work from somewhere else if you are cloud-based. The local server-based version of events is far more devastating.
Let’s examine some plus points and see why businesses are migrating to cloud:
Scale. How much power, storage and speed do you really need? In the version of events where you have your large humming room-heater of a server, the tradition is to aim high, which is expensive. Usually, you’ll wind up with a rapidly depreciating asset which is massively under-worked to ensure that you have some future-proofing built in. Hopefully. With the cloud version, you only specify what you need at that point and that is all. If you need more as you go along, you just change the specification and it is up and running in moments.
Capital costs versus ongoing costs. Your FD is already going bald and looks a shadow of his former self so why stress him further with such a large capital cost? Cloud is paid for monthly and you only pay for what you use: that and a can of Regaine and the old boy might yet live to see his retirement.
Dynamic changes need not be an IT nightmare. Let’s say that you want to use a contractor in another location for some specialist task or other and it is vital that this contractor has access to your live data. With a cloud server, this is not a problem as it does not matter what locations you want to work from, the access to your server will be quick and reliable. Also, if you need to beef-up the server’s capability for a few months to cope with the contractor’s extra demands placed upon it, a cloud server can quickly and easily be upscaled and then downscaled again as required.
Reliability. I know that you think that the three-year-old, pretty 19” rack-mounted server is bulletproof, with its RAID 5 disk drives and its twin Xeon configuration, but it is not. There is one constant with all computer components and that is that, eventually, they will fail. It may not be now or next week but at some point, something fundamental will pack in and your server will go offline until it is repaired. The cloud version will not suffer hardware failure like this as it is virtualised in at least one datacentre with the kind of hardware redundancy that you can only imagine: any component could fail, and another system would pick up the slack without you even noticing that anything had occurred. Maybe if the datacentre was nuked it would be a different story but that is the kind of level of destruction required to slow down your cloud server.
Hopefully, you now see exactly WHY businesses are moving to the cloud.
Brigantia is the UK distributor for the Egenera Xterity platform. There are many reasons for choosing this platform over the usual suspects and if you would like to hear what they are, why not get in touch? Call Brigantia on 020 3358 0090 or email partnersupport@brigantia.com to find out more and to be put in touch with a participating Brigantia Partner to help you with your migration to the cloud.