Over the last couple of years, Cloud computing has become more and more of a mainstream technology tool for businesses – both small and enterprise. For many businesses, though, the play for cloud-hosted services is more obvious than others. For smaller customers, the potential for leveraging a host of services off site is larger than ever, and offers a variety of choices which continue to evolve.
There are a number of forecasts for the growth of cloud services over the next five years: some say a 44% annual growth in workloads for the public cloud versus an 8.9% growth for on-premise computing workloads is expected in that time. By 2015, they say, end-user spending on cloud services could be more than $180 billion.
There are four basic deployment models for cloud computing: Public (available to the general public over the Internet), private (within a corporate firewall), community (shared between organizations) and hybrid (a combination of the three).
Cloud computing is a broad umbrella under which many sub-divisions fall. Cloud computing can include Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) where a specific application or service is offered to a customer as a subscription. Citrix Sharefile, Microsoft CRM Online and Office 365 are all examples of SaaS. These examples, offered through BSA Data Solutions, can bring a lot of value to small and mid-sized customers who don’t always have the IT administration resources to maintain these applications on their own.
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) allows businesses a platform on which they can create and deploy custom apps, databases and line-of-business services integrated into one platform. Examples of PaaS include Windows Azure. Similarly, through Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), businesses can purchase infrastructure from providers as virtual resources. Components include servers, memory, firewalls and more. One of the most recent, and prominent examples of IaaS providers is VMWare’s vCloud Hybrid Service.
What is exciting about VMWare’s vCloud Hybrid service, is it has the potential to be the best of both worlds – to bridge the gap between locally hosted virtual hosts, and the flexibility to move virtual workloads where they need them, when they need them. Using VMWare’s hosting services to provide cloud-based, disaster recovery is one key use where smaller customers can find a lot of value in the cloud.
Traditionally, customers have hosted these IT services in house – creating their own ‘private’ cloud. Some have said that private cloud infrastructures are becoming more and more the province of larger companies that have their own IT resources – staff, data centers, and have the money to invest in robust infrastructures. Smaller customers don’t always have access to those same resources, be it staff or money. Cloud services offer those same community based clients a respite from those requirements.
However, all of this is not to say that the SMB client can’t host on-premise infrastructure. Many are doing it quite successfully. And for those that like the idea of a ‘private’ cloud, companies like Microsoft can give small businesses their own dedicated equipment on a dedicated network; yet still host it offsite.
What these evolving cloud offerings provide is the ability for SMB customers to start making some strategic choices about where they invest their IT dollars and what kind of flexibility they can deliver to their users. BSA Data Solutions can show you how.