Many people, when moving to the cloud, look at it primarily as a means of saving money. Although I concede this impression is growing less prevalent, it still persists. Furthermore, most people taking this cost approach look at the savings purely from physical infrastructure rather than through labour, which represents the majority of real infrastructure costs through management, procurement, monitoring etc.
In fact, the key value most customers find from embracing cloud, once the dust settles, is in how they deliver services and run their businesses. Turning fixed assets into flexible cloud resources has a profound effect that ripples through the whole company. Although moving infrastructure in a ‘business as usual’ way to the cloud still derives many benefits, it’s the changes that occur afterwards that prove to be the most valuable. These changes happen as people in that organisation start to engage with the cloud and understand how to improve their working practices as a result of the newfound flexibility inherent in their cloud deployment.
The benefits of private clouds and public clouds are not the same. There are two key areas of differentiation between private cloud deployments and public cloud deployments: control with elasticity and control with flexibility.
Put simply, the private cloud does not give you elasticity. Yes, some platforms allow you to hibernate unused servers, saving power, but the servers remain dead, fixed assets, depreciating in value. In other words, with a private cloud you still suffer the same old problems of low utilisation plus the cost of expensive virtualisation software.
On the other hand, many public clouds deliver far less flexibility than private clouds in other aspects. With most public cloud implementations, you lose a degree of control and flexibility over:
- Choice of operating system and accessibility (resulting in inefficiency and privacy concerns)
- Configuration and control of networking (breaking applications)
- Resource sizing and server tailoring (leading to overpurchasing)
This loss of freedom drives many to stay on dedicated hardware, often through a private cloud. To address the issue of elasticity and low utilisation, some employ a hybrid strategy, keeping their ‘base load’ in-house with a private cloud, and outsourcing their varying requirements to the public cloud. This makes sense and is better in most cases than a pure private cloud deployment, but fundamentally doesn’t relieve the company of the management and procurement burdens associated with owning in-house infrastructure.
The reality is that all of these restrictions are vendor-imposed and not fundamental to a public cloud offering. That’s why CloudSigma was created, to retain the good things about dedicated infrastructure, like controlling the software and networking properly, as well as buying hardware that directly fits your requirements. We then married that to the positive features of cloud, like instant provisioning, transparent total cost of ownership (through our utility cloud resource delivery and pricing platform) and cash flow benefits. The result is a utility platform where you can create a virtual data centre within a public cloud environment, but retain the same degree of control and flexibility as a private cloud or dedicated server set-up. It’s a fundamentally different approach to cloud compared with most other IaaS offerings. Key benefits of our approach include:
- The ability to run systems defined by your organisation, leveraging existing knowledge
- Minimising upfront investment in migration with little or no vendor lock-in
- Significantly increasing performance through tailored cloud infrastructure that directly fits your needs
The nexus of these ideas and delivery models is an unparalleled level of price performance through efficient purchasing of resources, optimization of cloud infrastructure and predictable cost structures.
Contact us to find out how CloudSigma can positively impact the way you do business and be sure to sign up for a free cloud IaaS trial to test things first hand.
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