Discover the true potential of the cloud.

In the simplest terms, the cloud is “virtual” compute power and storage that is based off-premise and accessed through the internet or through direct connections. For most businesses, the cloud is a physically secure data center building that has multiple protections and redundancies from natural disasters and unstable utilities. This allows your IT needs to always be ‘on’ in support of your business needs. The cloud is highly revered by businesses because the cloud offers increased flexibility, scalability, on demand resources and alleviates geographical and typical hardware limitations.

Managed Cloud services provides ongoing technical support to monitor, maintain and upgrade clouds the same way on-premise storage needs to be maintained, right-sized, and added to when space runs out.

• Cost-effective – Cloud services reduce your capital intensive IT hardware costs by taking advantage of subscription-based IT; with the cloud, get pay for what you need and have on demand access to increase capacity. Avoid , purchasing hardware that you may or may not ever use.
• Reduces support and maintenance needs – By removing the need to maintain and support physical hardware, your IT budget is reduced, and your business can focus on strategic growth plans, shifting your attention to the future in a more tactical approach.
• Flexibility and scalability – Cloud resources are easily increased/decreased and changed on demand allowing you to pay for just what the business needs today with no fear of limitations should your business needs increase tomorrow.

The term ‘Public Cloud’ generally refers to services provided by very large (often global) corporations, typically with globally diverse data center locations. Some well-known examples include AWS, Microsoft Azure & Office-365, and Google Cloud. The term ‘cloud’ originated in the fact that it is often impossible to know exactly where your data is – it’s just ‘out there somewhere’.

Private Clouds are generally operated by national or regional providers and will operate from fewer and more defined data center locations.

Public Cloud services typically benefit from massive economies of scale and are therefore perceived as lower cost. Private Cloud services typically provide a more controlled environment, known data residency location(s), greater flexibility, and more personal support arrangements.

Before trying to decide which cloud is best, understand that the cloud altogether may not be best for all workloads. Deciding between cloud and on-premise, and among cloud solutions is not a simple task. Each possible solution has advantages and drawbacks. When deciding, it’s important to keep your goals in mind and keep an open mind to a segregated approach that optimizes the total solution by meeting application specific needs.

Comparing a hosted dedicated cloud with a hosted multi-tenant cloud, we’re simply looking at deciding whether or not to securely share physical infrastructure. To put it simply, think of a house (Dedicated Cloud) versus apartment building (Multi-tenant Cloud). In an apartment building, if the carpet or paint colour is changed it is changed for everyone while in a house, you decide if and when you want to change the carpet or paint colour in any room at any time.  However, in a house, all house costs are yours alone.  In an apartment building, costs are spread across many tenants therefore lower cost for any one tenant alone.

While every client is different and we would never prescribe a blanket cloud solution, we will share that unless your business is subject to heavy compliance or needs some highly customized base infrastructure, multi-tenant cloud is generally recommended.  This is because (1) you share the costs of base infrastructure – like CPU, Memory and Storage – with the other tenants and (2) you minimize unused capacity, only paying for what you need and accessing additional capacity in smaller blocks. Businesses largest concern with multi-tenancy is security, but clouds are designed with partitions that deliver complete security and autonomy from the other tenants.

Comparing private clouds with public clouds, we’re looking at the same question but on a larger scale. Public clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Azure have thousands of tenants with data stored in cloud locations around the world. Private clouds are just as they sound, private to you and you aren’t relying on any shared capacity. As a multi-tenant solution, public clouds can be very cost effective and can actually eliminate charges for unutilized capacity. However, serving such a large number of clients and with data centers all over the world, many public cloud companies cannot guarantee domestic country data residency; even if the client's access points are in Canada and the data is stored in Canada, often during transfer data may be routed through another country, causing concern that other countries may be able to seize data. This isn’t necessarily true for all public cloud solutions but is something we recommend being cautious about. As mentioned, we would never prescribe a blanket cloud solution and the decision whether a public cloud provider is best for your needs requires further understanding.