Which cloud is best?

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 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). If the carpet or paint colour is changed in the apartment building, it is changed for everyone, in a house you decide if and when you want to change the carpet or paint colour in any room at any time.  Additionally 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 customer 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. In addition, public clouds often take on some of the servicing required for clouds on behalf of their tenants. 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 customers and with data centers all over the world, many public cloud companies cannot guarantee domestic country data residency; even if the customer’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.