Entering The Cloud: Approaches To Modernising Your Business

When it comes to updating your companies IT infrastructure, the consequences of getting it wrong can be incredibly serious. The aim of modernisation is to make things simpler, more cost-effective and more efficient. This is especially important in small-mid sized businesses which can be easily killed off by cost, complexity and inefficiency.

The ingredients for a good, simple update to a companies IT infrastructure are innovation and modernisation. Oracle aims to make things simpler by combining software and hardware that work wonderfully together. They also produce solutions that are based on open-standards so that they can easily integrate with your existing IT infrastructure, avoiding the aforementioned issue of a huge change with a large risk attached to it. In basic terms, Oracle seeks to offer you the best of both worlds.

When it comes to modernising your IT infrastructure, it is impossible to ignore the Cloud. The idea of a new system is to make them easier to manage, and the Cloud can be easier than your old systems and create an effective difference. For example, the Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c resolves the standard time and is the only complete Cloud management solution on the market.

Many companies have used cloud to modernise its infrastructure as it can offer a way to host mission-critical applications in a cost-effective, secure, in-house way.

Security Considerations

For information heavy organisations, often a large portion of the stored data is highly confidential. For this reason, trust and privacy are always at the forefront of any possible changes. For most people, when they think of the Cloud the assume it is something abstract, far away and impossible to protect, but in reality that really isn’t the case.

There is a whole realm of possibility within Cloud computing and privacy can easily be maintained if that is the need of your business. Furthermore, the Cloud can offer a greatly increased flexibility. Cost-efficiency is another huge benefit of cloud computing as there is no longer a large-scale capital expenditure necessity.

Since the term ‘Cloud computing’ has been coined it has grown to encompass many different usages and models. For example, there are huge differences between the public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud.

Public Cloud

A public cloud makes resources available to businesses over the internet, such as applications or storage. In some cases this can be free but in mostly clients pay for the amount of resource they need. The most notable aspect of the public cloud is that it is shareable and offers a multi-tenanted environment.

One of the advantages to using the public cloud is the pay-by-usage style of the model avoids the need of new hardware and software, which can be increasingly beneficial for small businesses and start-ups which may not having the expenditure available needed for a more private function.

Private Cloud

Avoiding some of the downsides of the public cloud is the private cloud which has a larger focus on security and data protection than the public version. The users can be charged for usage in the same way as the public cloud but it uses technologies such as virtualisation to deliver computing resources to internal users.

A vendor- hosted private cloud, such as those which Oracle provides, are also known as partner cloud’s. The advantage of using this model is that the service is rented by the customer rather than making a capital investment. However it doesn’t offer the same economies scale wise that can often be associated with the public cloud.

Hybrid Cloud

The hybrid cloud is a combination of some of the computing resources offered in-house via a private cloud and some of the resources provided through a third party public cloud. For example, some companies may prefer to use a private cloud for more sensitive and confidential data storage, and a public cloud for the simpler IT functions.

Another way to use hybrid clouds would be to use private cloud on as needed basic, for example during the peak hours of work. Hybrid clouds offer an extended flexibility to any organisation, however their ultimate drawback is the potential complexity of multiple management.

Also read 4 Myths of Moving Your SQL Servers to the Cloud