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Choosing the right cloud for your business

Companies must know what to look for and what they hope to achieve when deciding between a private or a hosted cloud solution, says Richard Vester, director of Cloud Services at EOH.


Johannesburg, 20 Oct 2014

An increasing number of businesses are starting to embrace cloud, if they haven't already. However, with multiple choices both on the type of the cloud and different cloud providers, it isn't a simple task.

Once a business has seen the value in adopting the cloud, the next question is whether to go for a private or hosted cloud model. Richard Vester, director of Cloud Services at EOH, says you have to know what you are looking for, and what you hope to achieve, when deciding between a private or a hosted cloud.

He says private clouds, built using the business's own resources and data centre investments, leaves the business in control, but also means it has to carry the management overhead costs. Hosted clouds take on that burden, but then control is sacrificed to a certain extent. Businesses which handle highly sensitive information, such as banks and government bodies, and wish to gain the benefits of cloud computing without sacrificing or compromising security policies or flexibility, would be better off opting for the private cloud option.

"A private cloud exists within your organisation's firewall, giving you total control of your data, who can access it, where it resides, and how it is stored and transferred. Any business that handles sensitive or proprietary information, healthcare providers, financial institutions and suchlike, needs to be extremely careful of exposing third-party confidential data to any risk. In fact, enormous fines can be imposed on businesses that ignore this."

Private clouds provide these entities with a means of migrating their existing data centre investments into a far more scalable, user-friendly model, all the while making sure the date is protected, and still under the company's control.

In addition, private clouds are designed specifically for your business, its needs and requirements, Vester adds. "You will decide how things will work, bearing in mind your standards, technologies, applications, and of course, users. Businesses can leverage the technology they choose to, and can change when needed. The danger of vendor lock-in is removed. In addition, if something goes wrong, and we all know that things do, you can prioritise resolution based on the needs of your organisation, without having to deal with multiple external owners."

However, he says hosted clouds offer a greater return on investment as well as some other benefits. "With a hosted cloud, the provider makes applications, storage capacity and other resources available to businesses."

Vester explains that hosted clouds are less expensive than buying the hardware and other elements needed to run a private cloud. "The servers and hardware used by hosted clouds are hosted off-premises and allow businesses to 'rent' only what they need. They can also scale up or down as needed, eliminating waste."

In this way, businesses that want to lower their capital outlays can benefit from the hosted cloud, as they rely on the provider's infrastructure to deliver applications and services, and don't need to fork out large sums of money for the initial investment. "In addition, users will always have access to the latest technologies, without having to upgrade hardware and infrastructure themselves."

Economies of scale is another reason some companies opt for the hosted cloud. "Hosted clouds have greater economies of scale; private clouds simply cannot hope to compete with giants such as Amazon and Google, for example, when it comes to price."

Ultimately, Vester says each model has its own benefits, and many businesses end up going for a hybrid model, in which the organisation uses its own dedicated computing to handle proprietary and confidential information, while a hosted cloud offering is used to handle less sensitive and public information.

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EOH

EOH is one of the largest technology and knowledge services providers in South Africa and provides the technology, knowledge, skills and organisational ability critical to Africa's development and growth. EOH's 6 000 staff members deliver high value, end-to-end enterprise applications solutions, a wide range of outsourcing, network solutions, managed services and business service offerings to customers across all major industries.

EOH is the largest BEE implementer of enterprise applications, constantly exceeding customer expectations.

EOH Cloud Services offers fully managed end-to-end, hybrid cloud infrastructure as well as national and global MPLS VPN solutions, voice, metro Ethernet fibre and wireless access, data centre services and a range of Internet and last mile access solutions.

For more information, visit: www.eohcloud.co.za.

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