Not So Cloudy

I read with interest an article proclaiming in its headline that “Startups Move away from the cloud”.

In reality however the item should have had the less eye-catching, but more factually correct headline – “established businesses moving away from the PUBLIC cloud”.

What is clear is that “one size” does not fit all and businesses need to be able to choose from on-premise, rent/lease, hybrid and public cloud.

“The cloud” (basically publicly available datacentre capacity that is rented on a per hour/day/month basis) is perfect for specific needs:

• For the startup business that has yet to grow
• For an existing business that has to scale up and down very quickly (e.g. online gift company)
• For businesses with new ideas and insufficient physical capacity (“try before you buy”)

We also find the cloud is ideal for our customer’s services which emanate from the cloud – e.g. email. Given that email comes from the internet, needs to end up on the internet and is only threatened from the internet, the cloud is the perfect and probably most cost effective way of hosting email services.

As businesses grow and their needs become clear, the public clouds per-hour charging model often leads to potentially very high costs. For businesses that have these clear needs and a plan, we would advise considering a look at the alternatives, not all of which involve the capital expenditure that would have been at one time the only alternative.

• Rent/Lease – a route to using hardware with potential cost savings.
• Managed Service provider – bundles hardware rental with outsourced system management. All the benefits of the support of public cloud systems but keeps a lid on costs (agreed in advance)
• Hybrid cloud – Keeps potential expensive data/bandwidth hungry applications in house while hosting other systems externally (such as email). Interconnectivity between the two is easy.
• Private cloud – Utilizes your capital expenditure to its max so you squeeze out every ounce of power before buying more while still giving you redundancy and high availability.

As you can see – cloud is a perfectly legitimate choice – providing it’s an informed one and that you define your requirements. The cloud can be the perfect testing ground, but don’t consider it to be the end game.

Thanks to exploreB2B for their original item: https://exploreb2b.com/articles/startups-move-away-from-cloud

For more information on all of the services discussed here, why not drop me a line or connect up on LinkedIn.

Darrin