Which Cloud Is Right For You?

The cloud is easy when you know what you need.

Select how much CPU, memory, storage, and bandwidth you want. Click. Order. Compute. Something like that.

If you’re not sure what you need, however, the ease with which you can purchase and get locked into a cloud can quickly become a nightmare. Things get especially complicated when you engineer your applications and infrastructure for a particular framework that you’ll one day outscale.

You don’t need me to tell you that choosing a cloud is a big decision.

So, what does this mean for you?

Let’s start with a look at Private Clouds.

Private Cloud Uses

When we look out across our customer base, there are five conditions that tend to drive a private cloud decision:

1. Applications requiring high SLAs. In these situations, organizations require systems that are completely self-contained, capable of achieving 100% uptime.
2. Applications with clearly-defined compliance requirements. In these situations, organizations have very specific compliance requirements around data and/or business processes that must be met. A self-contained environment provides complete control over the variables that impact these objectives.
3. Back-office/legacy applications. In these situations, an organization has an application, or set of applications, that are optimized for very specific infrastructure stacks. In many cases these are heavy applications with significant dependencies among multiple services and databases.
4. Customer-facing applications. In these situations, the availability of the application takes precedence over everything else. Similar to applications requiring high SLAs, the difference here is that the requirement is purely external-facing and typically has a very high revenue per minute of uptime dependency.
5. Noise. Many organizations simply don’t want noisy neighbors. They want 100% control over their environment and all critical dependencies within their purview.

Now let’s look at shared clouds.

Shared Cloud Uses

We see organizations using shared clouds for a different, slightly narrower, set of reasons:

1. Testing and development. In these situations, organizations are looking for environments that can be quickly and easily defined, altered, and executed to meet rapidly changing criteria.
2. Short-term applications. In these situations, seasonality or other factors such as an ad campaign, etc. require an application to be available for only a short period of time. Shared clouds enable the rapid deployment, scale, and tear-down of infrastructure to support these requirements.
3. Applications with light compliance requirements. The exact opposite of the high compliance requirements noted above.
4. Cost vs. Performance. This is as simple as it sounds. Applications where the cost of providing them is more important than a mission-critical level of system performance are ideal for multi-tenant environments.

What’s Your Cloud Use Case?

For some organizations, there will be one right answer. We have a number of customers who are very comfortable with their private cloud’s performance, compliance, and control.

Conversely, we have a number of customers who are comfortable in a shared cloud environment. They take advantage of our multi-tenant Enterprise Cloud’s cost-effectiveness to meet their application’s requirements.

For other organizations, there isn’t one right answer. Certain applications may require private configurations, while other applications will be perfectly fine in shared environments.

If you’re not sure which cloud is right for you, ask. That’s what we’re here for. We’ll help you make the right decision no matter which cloud platform or provider you choose.