By Daniel Milburn

Daniel Milburn

A Consonus customer, a large information services developer and provider, spent years considering various cloud computing models and their permutations. The customer first examined three of the four cloud computing deployment models — private, community, public, and hybrid — then evaluated four different management options: in-house, hosted, managed, and managed/hosted.

What cloud computing model and management option did they choose? Well, let’s first look at the benefits and challenges of the three cloud models they considered.

Public Clouds

Public clouds offer the ability to avoid large capital expenditures while reducing operating expenses associated with managing a large assortment of compute, storage, data center, and bandwidth resources.  However, the public cloud limits flexibility when it comes to security, performance tuning, audit compliance, and service levels.

Private Clouds

As a general rule, private clouds require a substantial capital expenditure which, these days, is hard for most companies to justify.  But if you can overcome that obstacle, there are a number of advantages to this model, including flexibility, audit support, security control, performance tuning, plus the ability to allocate resources to higher priority applications thus maximizing the capabilities of your infrastructure.  With those benefits come the burden of hiring and staffing storage, network, systems, and data center experts, plus dealing with licensing issues, handling system issues at 2AM, replacing failed components, troubleshooting integration issues, and planning and budgeting for future needs.

Hybrid Clouds

Hybrid models allow you to leverage the advantages of both public and private clouds by placing the more common, less regulated applications and services into the public cloud while keeping legacy, or performance sensitive applications in a federated private cloud.  Several service providers offer this kind of functionality.

Back to the customer:  Due to capital expenditure challenges, they decided against building a private cloud. And the expense of high-bandwidth (10Gbps+) network connections meant that a public cloud was not viable for their needs.  So they opted to go with a hybrid cloud model that enabled them to reduce overhead related to data protection and disaster recovery, yet offered the capacity to deal with their demanding compute and data transfer volumes.

The bottom line is this: The cloud model you choose depends on your business requirements and how you can effectively balance the four main decision drivers: risk, cost, timing and resources. If you are not sure what makes the most sense for your business, contact a service provider like Consonus for help in finding the right solution — one that fits your organization’s unique requirements. The options are there. It’s your choice to make. Choose wisely.

Daniel Milburn brings 20 years of IT solutions experience in the areas of information security, systems architecture, network design, application development, and strategic planning.  At Consonus, Daniel has served as Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Hosting and Infrastructure Services since 2007.

This guest post is sponsored by Consonus.

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Tags: cloud computing, Consonus, Daniel Milburn, how do you choose