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Which Cloud is Best for You?

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DQI Bureau
New Update

Regardless of whether you are part of an enterprise or a small business, moving to the cloud is one step you cannot escape today. Today, the cloud is not just a point of discussion-it is a reality. In fact, according to IDC, the cloud software market reached $22.9 bn in revenue in 2011 and is estimated to grow to $67.3 bn by the year 2016.

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However, given the range of specific solutions different types of cloud have to offer, the market has been the center of discussion and debate, only creating more confusion for the CIOs planning a move. While the different types of cloud-private, public, and hybrid-are generally assumed to be the same, they differ widely in their nature, applications, data, and services offered.

Each has their own advantages and disadvantages, but in each case, the impact on application and network performance must be considered prior to implementation. The decision of choosing the right cloud service model for your enterprise therefore, is unarguably the most important one, in order to achieve a successful cloud adoption. Here are some points to consider while choosing the right cloud for your enterprise.

PUBLIC CLOUD

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A public cloud is one in which the services and infrastructure are provided off-site, over the internet. This means a company can sign up for and start using storage, processing, and other services immediately via an online portal.

Advantages of the public cloud include the flexibility and pricing of shared IT infrastructure-storage, power, etc, and customers pay for these as they use them. Further, the public cloud offers a scalable and adaptable solution at costs generally lower than building one's own private cloud. The cost of adaptability can be accounted for as an operating expense as and when incurred, rather than as a capital expense.

Public cloud services are also compelling because of scale and elasticity-a service provider supporting thousands of businesses can drive lower costs than any one business alone, and can provide adaptability for changing workloads as an operating expense rather than a capital expense.

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However, there are still concerns over security, privacy, and data control when it comes to the public cloud. One other major challenge is performance. Moving services to a public cloud means that enterprises must accept that their applications can potentially be run from anywhere in the world-wherever the data center of the service provider happens to be.

Most public cloud services do not specify data center locations in their terms of service, maximising their freedom to migrate work to reduce their operating costs. In essence, the distance (and latency) in accessing applications may significantly increase for everyone in the enterprise. More surprisingly, those distances may change unpredictably.

PRIVATE CLOUD

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The private cloud offers businesses the opportunity to operate all their IT infrastructure and services within firewalled limits. However, they can shift workloads among servers as and when usage increases or new applications are deployed. For industries dealing with critical and sensitive business data such as pharmaceutical or financial services, the private cloud is perhaps a better solution.

Private clouds also enable IT organisations to extract greater utility from the infrastructure that they have already have in place. In a typical private cloud deployment, enterprises undertake the consolidation of distributed IT resources and apply virtualisation to those resources in the data center. This enables IT to provide more cost-effective management while spinning up services faster.

However, this is a double-edged sword as private cloud deployments could put significant strain on existing resources and work processes. As IT departments consolidate resources, applications and data are typically moved further away from many end users. Branch office employees and mobile workers are now required to access further across the wide-area network (WAN) to get the information they need. The resulting latency can often dramatically reduce performance, and make the business less productive.

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At the same time, the consolidation will put more strain on the available bandwidth connecting branch offices to the data center. With consolidated resources, many more user requests will go back to the data center. The WAN will be responsible for carrying significantly more traffic, which could lead to bandwidth congestion, or even force the company to purchase more bandwidth.

Finally, the virtualized infrastructure and services in the private cloud may hamper IT's ability to monitor and troubleshoot applications.

Virtual switches on virtualized hosts see traffic that never touches the physical network. Virtual overlay networks offer great flexibility in partitioning a network rapidly, but to do so by building tunnels that traditional network monitoring tools can't see into. Fortunately, next generation network performance management solutions are available to handle this visibility problem.

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HYBRID CLOUD

Most of the challenges of both the public cloud and the private cloud are addressed by the hybrid cloud. The hybrid cloud offers a flexible model, where companies can choose between cloud models as business conditions vary. However, one challenge that arises in combining aspects of the public cloud and the private cloud in a single offering is an increase in difficulty of integration of services due to a loss of data consistency. Potential differences in interface, security, processing and reporting platforms arise with this and need to be dealt with.

Hybrid cloud, being a composite architecture offers applications delivered through a public service still located anywhere in the world, while private cloud applications are still consolidated into a small cluster of data centers, creating a potential network performance bottleneck.

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DELIVERING CONSISTENT, HIGH PERFORMANCE FOR CLOUD SERVICES

Public, private, and hybrid cloud environments all face the performance limitations inherent in today's applications and networks. Regardless of the type of cloud service being deployed by an enterprise, WAN optimization is a useful and proven method to achieve cost-effective high-performance and manageability of cloud offerings ensuring the performance levels and visibility needed to support a productive workforce. With increasing adoption of the cloud, organizations will sooner or later face the challenges that are best addressed with an optimization solution.

While organizations must consider the type of cloud that is best-fitted for their IT infrastructure, there has to exist a thorough understanding of the performance required by the users of each type of cloud service, and the deployment of WAN optimization technology to mitigate performance problems.

By overcoming application and network performance problems with WAN optimization, enterprises could leverage industry-leading technologies to deliver LAN-like performance, while using private or public cloud services. To successfully gain the benefits of cloud, organizations must have a resilient, scalable and high-performance network infrastructure. Without an optimized WAN that enables real-time connectivity to data, the promise of cloud cannot be fully translated into reality.

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