Cloud as we know it today was born out of the need to provide flexible IT for organisations as they grow. The current largest Public Cloud provider, AWS, was created as a spin off from its core business, which was experiencing a period of rapid growth as it expanded its services from selling books to becoming the largest online retailer. Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud were also in effect ‘spin offs’ from the service model they each used to provide online ‘Software as a Service’ Office tools like Word Processors, Presentation software and collaborative tools.
So why is cloud so pervasive? What is driving the move to Cloud and how can you leverage it?
All Cloud computing is supported by four underlying principles:
Because of these basic principles, the term ‘As a Service’ has become commonplace. Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) are commonly spoken about. The principles are simple – you consume the service you need, when you need it, and pay monthly.
Over the past ten years, IT companies have used the Principles of Cloud Computing to build some now very common delivery models. The most common – Public Cloud – grew out of the large Software as a Service models that Microsoft and Google offered, where underlying hardware is pooled, and pricing reflects the economies of scale.
There are now literally hundreds if not thousands of ‘As a Service’ offerings from Software to desktop to security – almost any IT service you can image can be offered from a shared environment using an ‘As a Service model’.
However, some organisations aren't comfortable putting their mission critical IT systems in a shared environment. They want a level of separation to guarantee security. So, Private Cloud was born.
It uses the same underlying principles as Public Cloud, but ensures that organisations have discrete or highly segregated hardware that is dedicated to running their workloads. Your organisation can still forget about the hardware and focus on the service.
As with everything, no one-size-fits-all and some scenarios could make use of both Public and Private Cloud and so the Hybrid Cloud model was born.
This uses elements of both the public and private cloud models to build the most cost-effective solution possible. Why run systems to manage your own office software (Word processor, presentation software etc.) when it's available ‘as a service’ from the public environment?
But equally, you might want to keep your data in a dedicated environment or need to run a legacy application.
The final model, Community Cloud, is the least common model spoken about, unless you start digging deeper into the world of public sector or larger corporate environments.
Some large organisations might have several discrete ‘businesses’ operating under a single corporate entity, or a public organisation might run a range of services for citizens. Why build separate IT systems for each business?
Aggregate the IT and manage as one entity. This reduces the cost of operation and creates a community of users with broadly similar aims but potentially diverse operational needs.
What does this mean for your organisation? Pooling hardware under the cloud model reduces the price you pay and allows you to be innovative and offer services at a competitive price point – great for running your business.
But security is always paramount and growing securely is also key.
What about things that are outside of the norm, such as edge cases - things that are unique to your business model through legacy approaches? How do you work with computing scenarios that don’t fit the ‘As a Service’ model?
Our SysCloud Enterprise Platform supports multi-models and is especially good at supporting edge cases.
At one level SysCloud offers highly competitive IaaS and PaaS services. We even support organisations to run SaaS services for their customer using SysCloud hosted infrastructure. We can seamlessly interconnect to the Public Cloud SaaS environments and even combine other specialist ‘As a Service’ offerings into a single service.
But what if you want to host some legacy applications that need their own dedicated physical hardware? What if you want to collocate hardware somewhere secure and then manage it yourself whilst also having some IaaS, leveraging the M365 or GSuite SaaS offerings? Not so simple to do in the Public Cloud...
You can’t ring up Microsoft or AWS and ask them to put some physical hardware in a rack in their datacentres – who would you call anyway? The deeper you go into edge cases, the less effective the Public Cloud providers become. They build their models on economies of scale which in turn do lead to a degree of needing you to conform.
At SysGroup, we continue to build out our SysCloud environment to support IaaS, PaaS and a multitude of edge cases.
We love taking complex solutions with multiple elements and architecting that into simple to manage services.
We locate our core hardware in the same datacentres as the Public Cloud providers, with the same levels of security and resilience. We continue to build out our georedundant architecture to ensure that no single failure causes customer issues. We also have our own 24/7/365 support teams that are on call to all of our customers.
Moving to the Cloud is a complex journey. Spinning up an M365 tenancy or GSuite environment with some associated online storage is one thing, but when it comes to integrating legacy services with new services, being ready for growth, adapting to a pandemic or whatever scenarios are next, then SysCloud offers a viable way of staying on top of your IT.
At the core of Cloud is cost effective aggregation of hardware utilisation and passing those savings on to the end user as effectively as possible. For your organisation this can mean:
Why don't you see how SysGroup can help?