For organizations, it is important to know which cloud model they should consider to use. There are many factors that you should consider when you are planning to chose cloud model. Here some recommendations for choosing cloud solution will discuss.
Organization’s Policy: One important factor is looking into internal and external policies. For example, in your organization there might be internal policy that due to privacy and security rules, you are not allowed to host any data outside your organization. In this case, you could not look for public cloud solution due to this policy. It might be case external policy by your partners, government or other stakeholders that won’t allow you to host data on public cloud. There could be some exception in this case, for example the policy might apply to majority of your organization architect but not all. For example, in your organization database should host internally as private cloud using SQL Server, but you allowed to manage internal client using public cloud such as Windows Intune. Another case is that, in your database, data related to customers must store locally, but you allowed hosting your employee data on cloud. You should consider all possible scenarios when you are planning to use public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud (public cloud + private cloud) or community cloud. For example in case that your company allowed to host employee data in public but customer data must be private, also consider case such as if your employee leave company and become your customer in future. Therefore, consider all possible cases and modeling, before you chose your cloud solution base on internal and external policies.
Cost: We couldn’t say one particular cloud solution is cheaper than other; it is different from case to case and company to company. Sometimes set up data center using System Center Solution could be much cheaper for you than deploy it using public cloud such as Windows Intune. In other case, it could be the other way around. Therefore, think about your organization’s requirement and look for all cases of cloud models, including public, private and hybrid and chose the cheapest one. You have to look for both long term and short term projects. For example, consider you need to do a project with some third-party companies and for that you required to setup SharePoint Server and give them access to that. If you use SharePoint Server for large number of people you might need to buy additional servers and it doesn’t worth for a short term project that those users will leave your company after project is over and in that case, you might consider buying SharePoint Online for that particular project. There is no single universal formula to calculate the cost for cloud. But you have to look for everything in detail for example:
And other cost, and then calculates long term and short term cost for all cloud models and chose the cheapest one.
Complexity: The world is going to simplicity and goal of all of these cloud solutions is to simplify complexities. When you design your cloud model, look for complexity factors and try to reduce them. Cloud model should not be difficult. For example, for small business organization that just getting started using System Center could be difficult for them and they might consider something simple such as Windows Intune. But as company growing and become more complex, manage it using Windows Intune could be difficult, may be define some scenarios and use cases be difficult in that case and it could be case that is better to use System Center products to simplify complexity. As company grows and more requirements coming, complexity will change. Sometimes, using public cloud is simple since you might say, I don’t need to worry about configuring too many things and in other case, you might say I have too many requirements that are easier to handle using private cloud and configure them myself, rather than they be pre-configure in public cloud or you might consider hybrid that contains both or use community cloud. You should take a look at degree of flexibility of requirements and users and think about different model and chose the best one which is as simple as possible.
In order to chose a cloud solution, there are many factors that some of them been discussed here. However, it is something that administrators and architect should look into it in different angels and they make a decision on model that is more suitable for their organizations.
Maheshkumar S Tiwari edited Original. Comment: Added Tag