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Private clouds can provide the same scalability and flexibility as public clouds. In addition, they
can overcome some anxiety regarding security because data can be kept within an organization’s firewalls. It makes little sense for today’s establishments to create their own private infrastructures when they can save time and resources by using a cloud hosting provider. Understanding how to create a private cloud can help you decide if it’s the best option for your business. Some issues to consider in making a decision are:
- How will your company benefit by having a private cloud? Are there specific business advantages in taking this approach?
- Will you be able to maintain an efficient private cloud and what will the infrastructure overhead be?
- What experience does your company have with virtualization and private cloud infrastructure?
- Switching from a public infrastructure to a private infrastructure requires planning. If not correctly organized there will be increased downtime, delays in product release and lower customer satisfaction. Moving to your own private cloud may require a substantial investment.
How can the Cloud Support our Business?
Small businesses today can function from disparate locations using
reliable cloud providers. Standard applications including MS Office, Exchange, Quick Books,
Word and other applications can be hosted from a cloud workspace provider and accessed anywhere and anytime. CRM providers such as Salesforce.com are designed to support small business and can be leased monthly rather than purchased, although this may add up to being more costly in the long run.
Despite widespread use of cloud services they are not always available, and when you are doing business on the cloud, you may not appreciate interruptions to business functions you need 24X7X52. Discontinuity of service is characteristic of many public clouds. Users of these services such as Pinterest and Netflix suffered a negative impact because of this.
For small to medium sized businesses, a combination of both public and private cloud services may be the ideal mechanism for providing security where necessary while saving money on applications that need less security with a public cloud. Cloud companies are becoming more security conscious, pressured by increased consumer demand in this area.
How Small Businesses can Profit from Private Cloud and Public Cloud
The cloud might be utilized for Software as a Service, or it might be used for all of a company’s servers and infrastructure. Cloud computing will be for everyone because there is really no turning back.
The near term trend for cloud computing is cheaper, more manageable and more reliable. Transitioning to cloud services is easier for smaller companies than for larger ones. Larger companies have numerous legacy computing systems so downtime, training and workflow changes are essential considerations.
Companies such as ad agencies with large data resources need to take special care when transitioning. Working on large files across the Internet can be too slow. There’s no reasonably priced bandwidth option that gives an enterprise sufficient service when working on extremely large files via the Internet. Resources that need to stay in-house can leverage virtualization, thus allowing for many cloud benefits such as when there is a hardware failure or when you are moving from your LAN to a public cloud. This means less downtime and faster recovery.
Private clouds use pooled, virtualized and distributed resources like public clouds, but the client using them controls them. Large companies typically operate their own data centers and are becoming more frequent users of private clouds. Public clouds can be used privately by employing restricted access and encryption.
You should consider your business processes and functions, level of privacy and compliance’s required for data and processing, and decide which of your business functions would be best suited for public cloud or private cloud. It may make sense to make a transition in stages with public cloud as your first step. Using virtualization at your facility can help you transition your data to the cloud of your choice.