Member Article

Onsite vs Cloud

Andrew Robson, CEO of Perfect Image, discusses why people are increasingly using cloud computing to power the IT infrastructure behind their business.

When people first started using PCs in their offices, the first generation of PC infrastructure usually involved physical servers sitting in your own premises, in your own office, and working from there.

Of course, over the last few years, people have started to move their servers out of the office and into data centres, looking to see improvements on service levels and availability over hosting and servicing their own IT infrastructures.

More recently, we’ve seen a third generation of infrastructure provision starting to emerge; a new approach has come along, and that’s using a cloud-based IT solution - ideal for businesses looking to get a true pay-as-you-go, cost effective and scalable infrastructure.

Each of these three approaches has their own advantages and disadvantages. If your servers are on premise, you’ve got the (sometimes perceived) benefits of not having to rely on a third party and having your data and applications in your own offices.

You may be in an industry with particular governance requirements around the data you hold, and an on-premise solution is an easy way to meet these, but you will have lots of hidden costs to worry about in providing the space. Things like the power, the air conditioning and the security you need to protect those physical servers and your ability to provide business continuity in the event of a disaster.

Once you move your systems out to a data centre, you benefit from all the advantages that location gives you to improve physical security and connectivity. In addition, you should usually get greater availability and resilience as a result and remove all those previously hidden costs

But true cloud takes this all a step further. As well as all the benefits a data centre brings, you can avoid any capital spend up front and get much greater flexibility, paying just for what you use at the end of each month. Generally, you’ll get lower costs and much greater scale from your provider too.

People have often worried about security and governance when using a true cloud-based solution, but really all that stuff has been dealt with now. Cloud computing has come so far, that even The Pentagon is going to start using true cloud services, and is working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for many of its solutions.

In practice, not all of these solutions fit all circumstances and a lot of people are mixing and matching, taking a hybrid approach to their IT infrastructure, and that can often be the best value and get you the best of all worlds.

Every organisation needs to make the right choice for their own circumstances, helping to meet their business needs, but more and more people are starting to move to a true cloud-based infrastructure or considering it for some elements of what they do, and we can only see that trend accelerating in the future.

To view a short video blog about the pros and cons of onsite vs cloud, visit: http://bit.ly/OnsiteVCloud.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Andrew Robson .