Question

In Modern Infrastructure strategy there are 2 basic models to consider. Keep in mind choosing the best for the business is the right strategic decision.

Model 1-Traditional onsite of co-located data center facility. This houses your network, storage and compute technologies. You purchase and manage the equipment and your entire network/compute environment yourself.

Model 2-Newer Cloud or SAS model. In this model all the network, comput, storage lives in the cloud or at a service provider's datacenter. It's model 1 but your paying someone to host and maintain the environment for you.

Compare and contrast the 2. What is the right strategy fr a smaller start up firm? What about a larger more established firm. Support your arguments and create a strength and weakness argument for each small vs larger firm. Remember concerns like cost, scale, security etc

Answer 1

Premise:

Model 1-Traditional onsite of co-located data center facility. This houses your network, storage and computes technologies. You purchase and manage the equipment and your entire network/compute environment yourself.

Model 2-Newer Cloud or SAS model. In this model all the network, compute storage lives in the cloud or at a service provider's datacenter. It's model 1 but you’re paying someone to host and maintain the environment for you.

Compare and contrast the 2 –

In yesteryears, Model-1 was the only way of data storage, computing, and management where every organization used to have a dedicated infrastructure for data management. As the scale of computation and complexity arose this setup started showing age and friction. With the advent of high speed and highly available connectivity the need of dedicated group within every firm started to deprecate, on top of this some of the today’s big player in cloud computing took this opportunity and carved out a niche market where the singular focus was on providing these services to others rather just consuming it within the boundaries of their own firm and Model-2 was born.

Some of the major causes of rise of cloud computing:

1. Cost: As the storage and computing power is provided on the pay-as-you-go basis the necessity of managing of all the backend infrastructure went away, which greatly reduced the cost associated with the procurement and management of the devices associated with it.
2. Scale: As the cloud platforms are built with scale in mind from day 0, scaling of the infrastructure is way easier than that of an on-premise solution.
3. Availability: Cloud providers sole purpose is to provide the service to others, because of this reason the logistic and technical support they have to mitigate the issues at hand is much better than any smaller team managing the same. Also, because of the scale, the backup management of any service is way better than one-off resources of the on-premise solution.
4. Security: Though this is a controversial top in general for the cloud computing where its a common belief that the data and resources present in someone else’s hand, the security is at risk and which is a valid point, but another thing to keep in mind is that the cloud providers business revolves around the data and computing services the security measures and the regular updates at their end is way higher than any normal implementation done at on-premise location.

Some of the disadvantage of cloud computing:

1. Cost: wait what? Isn’t cost being one of the major contributors to the rise of cloud computing. It is but for medium to a large organization where the scale outruns the deployment cost. For small firms, the initial investment for a fraction of the requirement than that of the large firms is quite expensive. For these specific cases for limited requirements on-premise solution makes more sense.
2. Vendor dependencies: Though the underlying concept is same across the board the implementation differs quite a lot and because of several dependent systems is to build around the core cloud offerings from any organizational perspective, this creates an inherent dependency in the chain of an organization. Which might act as a bottleneck while switching to another offering.
3. Availability: another one from the advantage section! Yes, though the network connectivity has improved leaps and bound in today day and age there are still some restriction and glitches affect the real-world availability of the cloud offerings.
4. Privacy and Attacks: As the data is sitting in someone else’s compound there is an inherent gap in the privacy of the data and its prone to any large-scale attack on the cloud provides end.

What is the right strategy for a smaller start-up firm?

As we discussed in brief on different aspects of cloud computing and on-premise solution (though indirectly). I would say it depends on the nature of startup to decide the kind of adoption.

If your startup uses a limited dimension of the offerings falling under small to medium scale usabilities like only a large storage, high computing or a web server separately then, an on-premise solution would suit better.

If your startup ‘s outlook is broader and requirements are wider then cloud computing would make much more sense and also the scaling of the implementation is way better in cloud offerings than that of any on-site solution.