Private, Public, or Hybrid? Oh My!

You’ve done the research. You’ve weighed up the pros and cons. You’ve assessed your business plan and have determined that moving to a cloud will enable you to meet your customers needs in this rapidly changing market. What do you need to ensure your business is cloud-ready? Moreover, what cloud platform is right for your business: Public, Private, or Hybrid?

Toe-test the waters or jump straight into the deep end?

The next step is to decide how far you want to go, and it is this assessment that will determine whether you will move into a public, private, or hybrid cloud model.

What sort of data does your business collect? If the data is considered sensitive, such as personal details or financial information, then a private cloud model is for you. However, if the data is non-sensitive, generic material with no value to those outside your company, then a public cloud model would suffice. But, a lot of company data doesn’t fit into the either/or bucket: it can fall into both categories. In that instance, a hybrid cloud might be the best solution.

All or part of your workload? The data your company collects and generates could fall into both categories: sensitive and generic. In that case, you might consider moving only part of your business to a cloud. If your primary reason for moving to a cloud model is to provide a fast, 24×7 accessible marketing service to your customers, then moving your marketing data to a public cloud would make sense, while keeping internal system data on-premise. The dedicated resources and security of a private cloud might be attractive to you, but the expense required for development and testing of applications would blow those costs out. In that situation, a hybrid cloud model could work for you: private for internal and customer-sensitive data; public for the application testing.

How many people will be accessing your services? Think about what your customer base is and how much you want it to scale. Also, if you are considering moving some or all of your internal systems to a cloud model as well, then those access rates need to be taken into consideration.

How much are you willing to spend? Moving to a cloud model can save your business money, but that can also depend on what services you want to utilise. The security and guaranteed services of a private cloud model are attractive, but they come with a cost. Determine if that cost outweighs the benefits.

Public or private or hybrid?

You’ve realised the benefits, and you’ve determined what parts of your business will move to a cloud. The next step is to decide whether to go public, private, or hybrid.

Public cloud

Public clouds share infrastructure resources among multiple tenants and are suited to non-sensitive data such as collaborative documents, customer analytical data, dev and test workloads, or marketing paraphernalia.

When talking Public cloud, think Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure.

If you are unsure whether your business would benefit from moving to a cloud environment, or you want to talk cloud options, Digital Sense can help you navigate the accumulation of Cloud Service Providers to determine the best solution for your business.

Digital Sense works with organisations to provide flexible workload hosting and protection solutions from on-premise to hyperscale cloud provisioned solutions. Digital Sense’s flexible workload hosting and protection solutions enable a smooth engagement for customers looking to transition from on-premise hosted and protected data to a full cloud hosted solution. Contact us, today!