If you have been a regular reader of these pages, then you will have read a lot recently about the ubiquitous cloud. It is the way to build platforms at the moment and it is changing the way IT infrastructure is designed in businesses.
Dare to be Dedicated
If you have been a regular reader of these pages, then you will have read a lot recently about the ubiquitous cloud. It is the way to build platforms at the moment and it is changing the way IT infrastructure is designed in businesses.
So what about dedicated hosting solutions as part of a bespoke enterprise hosting solution – does that still have a place? If you’ve been reading our news pages then you already know our answers to this: most definitely, yes.
A typical enterprise hosting set-up will often contain some cloud based elements but more and more frequently in the current climate, it will be virtualised in its entirety. For many companies however, dedicated physical architecture is still something that they want and need.
The cloud has answers to a lot of questions but not all. Some companies may well have custom-built and often legacy applications that they just don’t want to virtualise and moving them to a dedicated server set-up at a trusted hosting provider may be the most effective way of increasing performance and lowering IT budget spend.
Enterprise hosting with physical architecture elements still has the benefits of re-positioning IT as a service within an organisation, rather than as a department, something that is paid for as it is consumed with services added and subtracted as and when needed.
It cuts out the need for expensive purchases of kit to get things up and running alongside the continual management, patching and upgrading that is required from that point forward. Removing the planning and process around the purchase and maintenance of kit can really help to improve a company’s agility from a technological perspective, with these concerns being shouldered by the host when a change, expansion or improvement is required.
Security, another major stumbling block for many considering the cloud, can be assured with your own stand-alone system for critical applications and data storage, perhaps leaving the cloud to support the SaaS needs for all the desk tops in the office.
Performance issues are also minimised in an infrastructure of wholly dedicated physical resource and you can set your hardware up just the way you need it, with no concerns about your resource being contended, reduced or impacted by other users.
Many of you reading this will be thinking that ‘you get these benefits with a private cloud’ and you’d be right, you do. Private clouds offer the isolation companies need for secure applications/data and also provide the dedicated performance, unfettered by other users on the same box.
The private cloud is in many ways a natural evolution of dedicated servers, but for many, they still like the literal physical isolation, focused power, simplicity and often, familiarity that a rack of physical servers provides.
The cloud is the future, of that there is no doubt, and there will be many advances in that technology to come that will make it more and more compatible with the way businesses work. But there is still very much a place for dedicated machines in the mix with current cloud computing elements.
Businesses can still benefit from lower costs and capital outlay by having their infrastructure managed by an enterprise host, fine-tuning a flexible and scalable system of both cloud and physical components to best meet their needs.
This hybrid approach is a popular one, taking the best elements from both worlds and combining them to create something stronger and more resilient than the sum of its parts.
