By Lawrence Kohan, Senior Consultant, LogicsOne

This is the first of a two-part blog series intended to provide practical, real world examples of when it makes sense to use the cloud and when it does not.

We’re well into an exciting new era in the technology world.  The buzz-words are flying around at light speeds, and talk of “Cloud” and “software-defined-everything” is all the rage.

Advances in virtualization, which allows software processes to be decoupled from underlying hardware is giving way to amazing possibilities for moving around workloads as needed, either between racks in a datacenter, or even between datacenters!  In addition, the concept of “Cloud” is very exciting in the possibilities is offers business to leverage these advances by being able to move workloads offsite for greater availability, redundancy, disaster recovery.

Indeed, the promise of the Cloud as a whole is to provide IT as a service.  It’s a way of offering companies resources on a metered usage basis, so that they can consume as needed, grow or reduce their resources as needed, and only pay on a per use basis for what they consume, as needed.  The hope is to free up a business and their IT staff from worrying about the mundane, daily details and repetitive administrative tasks and burdens of keeping the business functioning and allows them to be more strategic with their time and efforts.  In the Cloud Era, servers and desktops can be provisioned, configured, and deployed in minutes instead of weeks!  The time saved allows the business to focus on all other areas of the business to make it more profitable, such as their marketing and advertising strategies, application/website development, and the betterment of their product and services.

Cloudy Conditions Ahead

All of this sounds like a wonderful dream.  However, before jumping in, it is important to understand what the business goals are.  What is it you intend to get out of the Cloud?  How do you intend to leverage it to your best advantage?  These questions and answers must come first before any decision is made regarding software vendors or Cloud service providers to be used.  The promise of the Cloud is tremendous gains in efficiency, but only when it is adopted and utilized correctly.

 

Register for our upcoming free webinar on June 12th on what’s missing in hybrid cloud management today. Speakers include Chris Ward from GreenPages, Praveen Asthana from Gravitant, and David Bartoletti, a top analyst from Forrester Research.

 

To Host or Not to Host?

For starters, let’s look at a simple use case: Whether or not to host a company’s e-mail in the Cloud.

Pros:

• Hosting email will be billed on a per-usage basis, either by number of user mailboxes, number of emails sent/received, or storage used.
• Day-to-day administration, availability, fault tolerance, backups are all handled by the service provider.  Little administration is needed aside from creating user accounts and mailboxes.
• Offsite-hosted email still has the same look-and-feel as on-premise email, and can be accessed remotely, in the same ways, from anywhere.  Most users don’t even know the difference!

Cons:

• Company is subject to outages and downtime windows of the service provider.  (In such a case, as long as it is not an unplanned outage or disaster, steps should be taken to ensure continued e-mail delivery, but systems may be unavailable for periods of time, usually on weekends or overnight)
• Initial migration and large data transfers can be an administrative burden.

There are factors that can either be positives or negatives depending on the business size and need.  For example, a small startup company with only several people needs to be extremely budget conscious.  In their case, it would certainly make more sense financially to outsource their e-mail for a monthly fee instead of looking to install and maintain their own internal email servers, which after hardware and software costs and licensing would cost 5 figures, not to mention needed at least one dedicated person to maintain it.  This is certainly not a cost-effective option for a small, young company trying to get off the ground.

 

Download this free whitepaper to learn more about how organizations can revolutionize the way it manages hybrid cloud environments.

 

At the same time, a very large enterprise with thousands of mailboxes may find the process of migration to be an expensive, time consuming administrative burden.  While offsite email would offer good availability and safeguards against system failure, perhaps even above and beyond what the enterprise currently utilizes, it is also a substantial risk; if the Cloud Provider has an outage that could affect the enterprise’s email access.  The same risk would apply to a small business as well; however, the smaller and more localized the business, the more likely they are to adapt to an e-mail outage and resume intra-office communications via secondary means—a contingency plan that is more difficult to act upon for a larger global enterprise.  And, yes, the enterprise that hosts e-mail internally has the same risk of an outage, however that enterprise can respond to an internal e-mail outage immediately and be able to ascertain how long the outage will be, instead of being at the mercy of the Cloud Provider’s timetable and troubleshooting efforts.

Therefore, in our sample “hosted e-mail” use case, it would make more sense for a smaller business to consider the option of moving e-mail services to the Cloud, and may not provide much value, if any, for the enterprise.

In the second part of this two-part blog series, I will cover when is a good time to utilize cloud for medium to large businesses. In the meantime, would love to hear your thoughts!

Webinar June 12th 11am-12pm EST “What’s Missing in Today’s Hybrid Cloud Management – Leveraging Cloud Brokerage” Speakers from Forrester, GreenPages, and Gravitant. Register here!