There is a lot of murkiness around cloud solutions and data centres because the distinctions aren’t always made clear – Paessler has provided it here in black & white.
The main difference between a data centre and the cloud is that in-house IT departments are usually responsible for the hardware and networking when running a data centre; with the cloud, you pay another company to do that for you. That doesn’t mean the responsibility of those cloud services is outsourced though. The in-house IT team still has to monitor system availability and meet their SLAs.
Data centres are generally more attractive to companies with sensitive information. Such companies may even have a company policy that prohibits third party access to their data. Cloud services, on the other hand, offer flexibility and scalability: You only pay for what you use.
Going Cloud
“Going Cloud” is not simply moving Virtual Machines to AWS, Azure or Google, or getting rid of the servers. It’s the chance to rethink processes, to upgrade, and to streamline.
Before moving such services to the cloud, you can, as with every network disaster plan, ask yourself “what can I do to mitigate some of the possible risks, and at what price?” Since there’s a direct correlation between investment and availability, you can use this formula to help assess the risk:
(costs < (loss in revenue X probability of occurrence))
The Hybrid
It doesn’t have to be one or the other. Companies might choose to host less sensitive data in the cloud and critical information in a data centre, or implement a Hybrid Cloud approach combining on-premise, private cloud and third-party services, with orchestration between the platforms. Allowing workloads to move between private and public clouds, as computing needs and costs change, gives businesses more data deployment options and greater flexibility.
Supporting the transition
Paessler’s vision is to ensure computers and networks (the foundation of modern society) work reliably at all times. Paessler understands that cloud-based computing opens new paradigms for development, usage, management and IT professionals. Our mission is to support IT professionals during this shift, helping them to maintain network uptime. Nothing should impact the network, regardless of where it sits: data centre or cloud.
PRTG Network Monitor is a unified network monitoring solution which can monitor your data centre, and your cloud services. The IT administrator gets a global view of their IT estate so they can intervene and take control where necessary. Even if IT infrastructure and services are hosted elsewhere, it doesn’t mean the responsibility is.
