FEATURE
infrastructure, providing benefits in the
form of customer satisfaction due to more
customised infrastructure.
Deciding where to invest – costs,
benefits and risks
Businesses need to carefully evaluate their
short, medium and long-term priorities
to ensure they make the most efficient
use of available budget. The beauty of
having such varied and competing choices
also presents risks and deciding on a
strategy should be based on individual
circumstances and needs, rather than
general industry trends.
of the vendor who is delivering the
service with no upkeep of physical
servers to be considered.
Cloud solutions are usually also
subscription-based and involve a monthly
or annual fee for use. Vendors provide
cloud services via backbone providers
such as Amazon Web Services, Leaseweb
or Rackspace and often offer 99% plus
uptime guarantees and the ability to load
balance in region for optimal speed and
performance delivery.
Eltjo Hofstee, Managing Director,
Leaseweb UK
delivered from and maintaining security
and access to that server location.
In terms of investment, on-premises
generally requires a level of capital
expenditure – part of the attraction of
outsourced cloud is that businesses can
shift this to operational costs.
Cloud
Cloud solutions are hosted and delivered
via an off-site cloud system, typically
accessed via a desktop or mobile
browser. All data and configuration
are held in the cloud and do not reside
on the client site. Updates to the
application, along with all security and
availability, are usually the responsibility
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Issue 07
Hybrid cloud
Like the phrase suggests, hybrid cloud
is a cloud computing environment that
uses a mix of on-premises, colocation,
private cloud and public cloud services
with orchestration between all the
platforms. Hybrid cloud solutions provide
greater flexibility for companies seeking
both hosting resources and the ability to
run classified applications privately for
example. If a company has regulatory
requirements for data handling and
storage, then this can be provided in the
private cloud. Similarly, an organisation
could host its e-commerce site within a
private cloud and its corporate site within
the public cloud.
When it comes to innovative technologies,
hybrid cloud solutions offer far more
opportunities than any other type of
For those businesses looking to shift away
from on-prem, hybrid infrastructure is
beneficial in the short term. This gives an
organisation time to transition smoothly
to 100% cloud-based architecture if that
is its objective. On-premises innovation
and cloud-based analytics can be aligned
to yield maximum results and evolve
inter-connectedly. The usage of one or the
other can also be scaled up or down as
per requirement.
Measuring the ROI of your data
centre investment
Ultimately, successfully measuring the ROI
of data centre investment should be based
on how effectively it meets the needs of
both the business and IT sections of an
organisation. Too often, the IT team is set
on providing the best solution, which can
be time consuming and costly to deploy,
while top management may often insist
on faster, cheaper methods to get results.
The disparity can be compounded by
hidden costs, particularly in on-prem
situations, where for example one
department could be responsible for
a particular cost, which might not be
known to management, resulting in a
total budget expense that is far higher
than was expected.
Assessing, deploying and evaluating
therefore relies on a solid alliance between
both these sides of the business. Only
then can organisations truly understand
the benefits and weaknesses of their
technology choices. ◊
www.intelligentdatacentres.com