Cloud Services - A Leap in Technology or Simply Outsourcing?

Cloud Services – is it the next step in technology or is it just outsourcing your IT needs?

What a great question!  I hear it a lot from both my prospects and customers.  In years past, companies have begun to allow 3^rd party companies host their data servers in remote locations, on the premise it provides better disaster recovery and better security than housing on-site.  Does it really?  Let’s discuss…

While the practice of keeping your equipment in a remote location (commonly referred to as “Co-Location services) has been around for some time, the actual benefit is up in the air.  Yes, co-location does provide some added piece of mind.  Typically “Co-Lo” facilities come with emergency power supplies, diesel generators, battery backup, 24 hour security, etc.  Sounds good, and you can probably save some cap-ex costs by not having to build the power grid yourself.  Throw in the added value of saving the real estate costs of housing it yourself and co-location seems like a reasonable way to go.

Cloud Computing comes with many advantages

With cloud services, you get all the benefits of co-location, plus a lot more.  No longer are you using your own servers, paying your own maintenance fees, or paying the salary of the IT guy to visit the co-lo site every time you need to change some hardware.  Using cloud services gives your company the benefit of state of the art, enterprise grade equipment with 24x7x365 on-site monitoring.  With the right provider, your data is automatically backed up at multiple data centers across the country, providing true disaster recovery protection.  If you live in Boston, your data could be backed up in California.  It would take quite a disaster to reach across the United States!   

If you need to add hardware, you visit the web portal to the server on your local PC, make a couple entries on a web page and Voila!  You have additional server space within a few minutes.  No longer are you dependent on waiting for a new server to be built and shipped from your vendor.  I’ve seen this take process up to 4 weeks.

After we discuss these facts, the conversations with my clients usually then quickly turn to “But my IT staff has been with me for years. I don't want to eliminate their jobs.  They have families to support. ”  

Sure they do.  We all do.   Cloud services doesn’t need to reduce headcount.  The use of cloud services simply changes  the focus for your IT staff,  allowing them to concentrate on issues critical to growing your business, rather than maintaining it.  By removing the daily chore of monitoring the platform and network, they now have the time needed to create the new software program your marketing group has requested; they can finish the bandwidth reports your CFO has been waiting for to evaluate network costs.  There are loads of projects they can do.  Take a quick look at the IT task schedule at your next staff meeting.  There’s plenty to do…….

The age-old saying “Time is Money” comes back into play and creates more revenues for your company because the use of cloud services will add time back into your IT staff’s day.  It may even save you some money too!

If you’re interested in more detailed information on the benefits of cloud services for your business, please reach out to me via email dave@davehanron.com or via Twitter @DaveHanron.  I can also tell you how you can get a free 30 day no-risk trial in the “Cloud”.

If anyone has some other benefits of “cloud services” I’d enjoying hearing about your personal experiences……

Part 2: "SaaS" vs "PaaS" vs "IaaS"

In my previous segment, we covered a general overview of “Cloud Services”.  We mentioned “Public and “Private” clouds, and gave some examples of each type.

In this chapter, we will be discussing “Cloud Computing”.  There are 3 major types of “Cloud Computing”:

                           Software as a Service (SaaS)

                           Platform as a Service (PaaS)

                           Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Here's a basic screenshot of Expedia

Software as a Service (Saas) should be a familiar term to many of us.  Loads of sales folks lay claim to selling “SaaS” services.  But what exactly is that?  SaaS refers to a program where the Customer utilizes a platform belonging to a provider (the company who owns the application) which runs on a cloud service infrastructure.  A good real world example of “SaaS” would be the travel service provided by Expedia.  The consumer goes to Expedia's website and enters information on the destinations, dates, and times for their travel and Expedia’s “SaaS” returns available options to choose from and offers booking capabilities.

Zimbra is a type of "Paas"

Platform as a Service “PaaS” is a bit more complex.  In “PaaS” a company can create their own applications and merely run them through a provider’s platform.  A popular example of a “PaaS” in use today would be Zimbra Desktop which enables a person to aggregate accounts across platforms (like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Zimbra) and social accounts (like Facebook and Twitter), to make reading and posting information more simple.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds are created consisting of virtual machines (servers, storage, routers, firewalls, etc) which are made available to companies on demand to run their own in-house applications.  The hardware is housed in a "Data Center".  These applications are harder to identify, as one of the main purposes of IaaS is to allow the company to give the impression the platform is exclusive to their company and hosted and maintained by their staff.

The major advantage to IaaS is additional servers and storage may be configured in minutes, not days or weeks, and allows almost instant growth of network resources.  Multiple platforms can share a single physical server, but be completely isolated from one another, ensuring a totally secure computing environment.

The ability to run multiple platforms on a single server creates tremendous cost benefit to a customer.  There is little CAPEX (capital expense) associated with additional capacity and the finance department can “pay as they go” for resources (CFO’s are thrilled with this!).  With the proper provider, customers can benefit from virtual control panels, firewalls, nearly unlimited storage capacity, and many other features.  All this comes with savings in energy consumption, real estate costs, network, hardware expenditures, and dollars spent on IT resources.

In the next segment, we will explore the world of “IaaS” in greater detail, touching on additional specifics and overall cost efficiencies available.

I’m always available to assist individually should you have “cloud” questions prior to my next entry. Please either email me at dave@davehanron.com or complete my form for “More Information” located on the side of my blog page.  If you have any comments or questions, they can also be entered in the comments section below.