How can a cloud strategy be deployed?
admin August 1, 2022 0 Comments

How can a cloud strategy be deployed?

There are four different types of cloud deployments: public clouds, private clouds, hybrid clouds, and multi-cloud deployments. A preliminary step in cloud adoption is to determine which deployment option is most appropriate for your organization. The deployment options are not set in stone, organizations can switch between them based on their business and technology needs.

Is public cloud computing a good idea?

A public cloud is a shared, on-demand infrastructure and resource provided by a third party. In a public cloud deployment, an organization uses software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offered by public cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, without relying on a private cloud (on-premises).

Many of the organizations that have been described as being ‘born in the cloud’ have utilized public cloud services from the beginning and have no dependence on legacy infrastructure or outdated software. It is also common for smaller companies that don’t have the budget or personnel to staff their own data centers or private clouds to deploy on the public cloud.

What does it mean to deploy a private cloud?

A private cloud is an infrastructure and resource pool that is dedicated to a specific organization and can be accessed when needed. On-premises data centers and private clouds are often used interchangeably.

In private cloud deployments, the business is responsible for the infrastructure, applications, and security. Private cloud resources can be accessed via private networks or VPNs, while external users can access the organization’s IT resources through a web interface. 

Regulatory compliance, security protocols, and leveraging existing investments in IT infrastructure are often reasons companies turn to private clouds. In large enterprises, IT can operate as if it is a cloud provider, providing IT services to the line of business departments, self-service provisioning for developers, and billing departments for private cloud services rendered to them. A larger data center can also be operated as a private cloud, which can provide many of the benefits of a public cloud, especially for organizations with a large amount of data.

How do hybrid cloud deployments work?

In a hybrid cloud, public cloud and private cloud services work together to provide consistency across operations and infrastructure. Hybrid cloud deployments always have public and private components by definition.

Hybrid cloud deployments serve a variety of purposes, and their use continues to grow. The hybrid approach is often used by organizations that want to migrate workloads to the public cloud, first migrating those workloads that are the least ‘sticky’, such as front-end applications that do not process sensitive data stored on-premises. As application migration and modern application deployment techniques become more prevalent, an increasing number of applications can be migrated.

Furthermore, hybrid deployments offer elasticity and scalability. A retailer with a sharp increase in accesses during the holiday season may be able to elastically scale its front end from private to public cloud servers by spinning up new instances rapidly. Thus, spikes in demand can be quickly met without having to procure extra infrastructure for the holiday rush or overprovision and leave that infrastructure idle for most of the year.

How does multi-cloud deployment work?

A multi-cloud is a combination of one or more public clouds and private clouds.

There are many organizations that use more than one public cloud provider. Azure might be used for exchange and database servers, AWS for hosting virtual machines and newly refactored code running in containers, and Google Cloud Platform for collaboration and office productivity tools.

When individual departments procure their own cloud services without IT knowledge, or when a merger or acquisition adds a new provider to the enterprise cloud, organizations often adopt a multi-cloud deployment ‘accidentally’.

Furthermore, since CSPs offer different services, organizations can craft a computing strategy that is perfect for their needs by picking and choosing the services they require. In addition, some organizations use cloud arbitrage to match needs to the CSP offering the best deal at the time. Multi-cloud orchestration tools such as Kubernetes provide these organizations with the ability to seamlessly migrate application workloads from one cloud provider to another and back again without affecting user performance.

Finally, there can be a combination of deployment models. Organizations can be both multi-cloud and hybrid cloud if they utilize multiple CSPs as well as their own private cloud.

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