For SMBs (small to medium businesses) all the buzz they are hearing about public and private clouds can be a bit daunting. In many cases they have an IT shop that isn't very large, and perhaps has mostly generalists at the helm. Even for them, the terms may draw a bit of confusion, as they attempt to muddle through the outside excitement. In truth, the two approaches to cloud services are fairly straight forward, and summarily different in their thinking. As for defining them the public could is more or less the use of a hosting provider (Microsoft, Amazon, Rackspace, etc) to host your applications and services. You would then access them via the public internet over secure connections, and all the hardware maintenance would be completed by the host company as a part of their hosting fees. Private cloud on the other hand would be the business hosting their own servers that would run virtualized services and applications that you would deliver from that location. You would be able to access them over the internet over secure connections, or via VPN or local link depending on your location at the time.
So we must ask ourselves, where are other businesses going? There has been a lot of hype over public cloud providers due to the low cost and low maintenance of paying for such hosting. But I'm not entirely convinced that the game has entirely went in that direction. I recently read over a Forbes article that leads me to believe that the private cloud is still a dominant force. The quote below is citing a survey of 570 IT managers (conducted by Freeform Dynamics as specified in the original article.
" More than 70% of respondents say they view the private cloud as “a natural progression from virtualization.” Only about 20% agree that “private cloud and public cloud go hand in hand,” and even fewer, less than 10%, see the private cloud as a safer alternative to public cloud offerings.
There is much greater impetus to move into private cloud than private cloud as well, especially among larger organizations. Tellingly, more than 40% agree with the statement that “most of our internal IT will be private cloud based over time.” By contrast, fewer than 10% feel that most of their IT will go to public cloud. " -Joe McKendrick, contributer at Forbes (link to article).
Those of you who have read my earlier articles already know that I'm a pretty keen proponent of the private cloud. It would seem that I'm not alone in this preference as organizations are becoming comfortable with taking visualization to its next logical step and preparing their own private cloud offerings. These solutions allow them to deliver in house solutions to their internal and external customers, and without exposing them to the risks involved in taking on a 3rd party partner.
But what does this ultimately mean for SMBs? Honestly the private vs public cloud debate is a bit less black and white when you go down to organizations of this size. In large enterprise environments they have massive IT budgets and a move the private cloud is much easier to accomplish, and certainly has very attractive and fast returns. For SMBs its a bit more nuanced in that there are situations where portions of both ways of thinking are beneficial. For example this type of organization might find great benefit from offloading their email and document software services to either Office 365, or to Google Docs and Gmail. While at the same time retaining all of their computer backups, financial records, customer records and really anything that would be deemed 'confidential' on their small private cloud.
At the end of the day, the SMB needs to weigh cost, accessibility, security, and privacy as the key factors in their IT decision making. Depending on the business they are in there will be different requirements for each and a different solution may be required. For example a doctor's office is going to have to comply with all sorts of HIPPA regulations on patient privacy, and thus is going to be suited to a purely private cloud environment. On the other hand a retail oriented company may have the ability to use the public cloud a bit, as the only truly confidential bits of information are their own financial records, and customer information.
For most SMBs I do have some basic suggestions, though this will of course not fit all strategies. If you feel the need to use the public cloud, I suggest only doing so for documents, such as with Google Docs. I honestly suggest then purchasing some hardware and using a hypervisor to virtualize email solutions (I suggest Zimbra for the cost savings as it runs on linux and can be gotten for free or a low price for certain features) and to conduct all of your confidential business on your local PCs, or via VMs set up as virtual desktops. As for your backup and disaster recovery planning, I suggest picking up a backup appliance like the one my company sells (3x Backup appliance) and setting it up offsite.
In any event if you have any comments to add to the discussion please add them below. If you have had any experiences with either public or private cloud solutions please tell us about them, as it may help others in their decision making processes. Also, check out the 3X blog, as we very recently gained a global partner out of Australia which is very exciting news.
So we must ask ourselves, where are other businesses going? There has been a lot of hype over public cloud providers due to the low cost and low maintenance of paying for such hosting. But I'm not entirely convinced that the game has entirely went in that direction. I recently read over a Forbes article that leads me to believe that the private cloud is still a dominant force. The quote below is citing a survey of 570 IT managers (conducted by Freeform Dynamics as specified in the original article.
" More than 70% of respondents say they view the private cloud as “a natural progression from virtualization.” Only about 20% agree that “private cloud and public cloud go hand in hand,” and even fewer, less than 10%, see the private cloud as a safer alternative to public cloud offerings.
There is much greater impetus to move into private cloud than private cloud as well, especially among larger organizations. Tellingly, more than 40% agree with the statement that “most of our internal IT will be private cloud based over time.” By contrast, fewer than 10% feel that most of their IT will go to public cloud. " -Joe McKendrick, contributer at Forbes (link to article).
Those of you who have read my earlier articles already know that I'm a pretty keen proponent of the private cloud. It would seem that I'm not alone in this preference as organizations are becoming comfortable with taking visualization to its next logical step and preparing their own private cloud offerings. These solutions allow them to deliver in house solutions to their internal and external customers, and without exposing them to the risks involved in taking on a 3rd party partner.
But what does this ultimately mean for SMBs? Honestly the private vs public cloud debate is a bit less black and white when you go down to organizations of this size. In large enterprise environments they have massive IT budgets and a move the private cloud is much easier to accomplish, and certainly has very attractive and fast returns. For SMBs its a bit more nuanced in that there are situations where portions of both ways of thinking are beneficial. For example this type of organization might find great benefit from offloading their email and document software services to either Office 365, or to Google Docs and Gmail. While at the same time retaining all of their computer backups, financial records, customer records and really anything that would be deemed 'confidential' on their small private cloud.
At the end of the day, the SMB needs to weigh cost, accessibility, security, and privacy as the key factors in their IT decision making. Depending on the business they are in there will be different requirements for each and a different solution may be required. For example a doctor's office is going to have to comply with all sorts of HIPPA regulations on patient privacy, and thus is going to be suited to a purely private cloud environment. On the other hand a retail oriented company may have the ability to use the public cloud a bit, as the only truly confidential bits of information are their own financial records, and customer information.
For most SMBs I do have some basic suggestions, though this will of course not fit all strategies. If you feel the need to use the public cloud, I suggest only doing so for documents, such as with Google Docs. I honestly suggest then purchasing some hardware and using a hypervisor to virtualize email solutions (I suggest Zimbra for the cost savings as it runs on linux and can be gotten for free or a low price for certain features) and to conduct all of your confidential business on your local PCs, or via VMs set up as virtual desktops. As for your backup and disaster recovery planning, I suggest picking up a backup appliance like the one my company sells (3x Backup appliance) and setting it up offsite.
In any event if you have any comments to add to the discussion please add them below. If you have had any experiences with either public or private cloud solutions please tell us about them, as it may help others in their decision making processes. Also, check out the 3X blog, as we very recently gained a global partner out of Australia which is very exciting news.
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