Member Article

Your cloud, your choice  

If you listened to the hype around cloud you might think it was new, but here at ITPS we have been implementing successful cloud infrastructures for over a decade.

Cloud simply means IT services delivered via the internet. There are so many options you can create your cloud, your way, so don’t fall into the trap of thinking you must decide between public and private cloud. Choose a tailored model that will deliver the right results for your business, and you could be looking at increased efficiency, flexibility and security, and in many cases a decrease in costs. Broadly, cloud allows for the following:

You pay only for what you use – Instead of the cost of maintaining an infrastructure designed to cope with peak demand, cloud pricing works on a pay as you go model with pre-agreed credit limits that keep costs under control. Improved resilience and security - your data is in the cloud so no need to worry about lost or damaged devices. Everything as a service – infrastructure, platform, software, disaster recovery and unified communications can all be provided as a service, just like any other business utility.

Part or all of your infrastructure can live outside your organisation – you choose. A virtual private data centre solution means your infrastructure is independent of physical server requirements, delivering more flexibility and simpler management.

Increased flexibility – gives you instant extra bandwidth as and when you need it, for instance to spin up new virtual servers to test applications in a live environment without affecting service.

So how do you choose the best route for your business? A good data centre partner will guide you through the options, but here is a quick guide to give you an overview.

Private cloud: this can be on or off-premise, dedicated to your organisation, running over your own IT infrastructure. Public cloud: this describes off-premise IT capabilities or applications, provided by other parties and shared between multiple organisations, using high tech tools to keep your data separate and secure.

Hybrid cloud: a computing environment that uses a combination of private, public, on and off-premise cloud services. Applications and data move seamlessly, according to where the computing power is required. Public cloud services can be deployed in a private cloud model. Connectivity: Whichever cloud model you choose, make sure your IT partner has a fast, high capacity connectivity backbone in place, preferably 10G, to give a big enough pipeline to deliver a quality cloud service.

To give you a couple of examples, client A might opt to hold their business critical applications on their own servers on premise and locate other less critical functions at our three ISO27001-certified data centres; while client B might choose to rent servers in our data centres and hold all applications and data there.

In both cases the systems, applications and data can be securely backed up to our data centres, allowing clients to specify recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO). RPO means the client deciding on the time lapse between backups, and the amount of data that could be lost between those backups, while RTO is the maximum period they are prepared to live without access to systems and data, without damage to the business. For instance organisations such as banks and emergency services often opt for zero RPO and RTO, as a loss of services and data would be catastrophic.

That’s a very quick and simple overview of cloud. If you are still uncertain about what it can bring to your business, give us a call and we will help you create a model that is right for your needs.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by ITPS Ltd .