Moving to the Private Cloud A Decision Maker’s Guide KEITH BATES
Chairman of Cloud Computing Centre
So, you’ve made the decision to take your IT infrastructure to the Cloud, but what kind of Cloud services do you require? ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ clouds are terms that those who are considering Cloud services are using frequently, but what makes a cloud either public or private, and what are the advantages of either and when is each use most appropriate? Keith Bates, Chairman of Cloud Computing Centre, offers suggestions on where to start.
Understanding the Cloud
The first issue to address and clarify is the difference between the public and the private cloud. Under a public cloud model, a company or individual will subscribe to a service – a piece of software such as
Salesforce.com, email such as Google mail or online document backup – and typically has no knowledge of the underlying technology, from operating system to database. Companies have no idea where key data is being stored – making the public model totally impossible and impractical for any organisation holding UK government data which must be stored within the UK borders.
Many of these public cloud services are increasingly provided by large organisations, such as Amazon and Google, to exploit their own spare capacity. However, these companies are not offering any Service Level Agreements (SLA) to guarantee performance. And whilst performance is typically satisfactory, during peak times, such as the weeks before Christmas, users
can experience a significant drop in response – with no recourse available to them.
A private cloud, in contrast, offers companies the chance to specify every last detail of the infrastructure supporting and providing the application or service, from the make and model of the hardware, to network management tools and firewalls.
The infrastructure is not shared with any third parties and the cloud provider will offer an SLA with clearly defined financial penalties for any breach in performance.
Typically hosted in a highly secure, Tier 3 or Tier 4 data centre environment within the UK, private cloud organisations know where the data is, who is managing it and who has access. This model is obviously more expensive than the public cloud but offers the level of performance and support required for high volume transactional processing systems, such as finance and ERP, which require guaranteed processing power.
A less expensive version of the private cloud can be achieved by sharing the resources with other organisations. Indeed the vast majority of private cloud solutions are delivered in this way. On occasions where the minutiae of the underlying infrastructure isn’t a concern, but the provision of an SLA is, then this offers the chance to leverage economies to scale and share a robust, secure infrastructure with a defined set of customers.
Flexible Model In addition, a growing number of software vendors –such as finance, CRM and payroll providers – are opting for private
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