Cloud vs. In-House Application Hosting for Government Institutions
In the last half-decade, sever virtualization market had an explosive growth — according to Gartner’s market research, more than half of installed applications were running in a server virtualized environment by the end of 2012.
Wide adaptation of server virtualization technology has prompted a technology revolution — the cloud computing has finally reached maturity levels required for enterprise software implementation. Being pushed by all major industry leaders (IBM — PureSystems, Oracle — Cloud Platform, HP — CloudSystem), the cloud computing model is rapidly progressing along the lines of security, data governance, service resilience and availability. Therefore, it is a little surprise that the cloud is seen as the next computing platform for enterprise software by both private and public sector organizations.
Considering that cost saving, consolidation and efficiency are a top priority items for both Canadian and US government IT organizations, there is no doubt that shift towards server virtualization and cloud computing model adaptation will continue to accelerate. In fact, a number of on-going government initiatives on both sides of the border are aimed squarely to provide leadership and guidance in the adaptation of the cloud computing model by the government IT organizations. Like most complex technologies, cloud computing offers both advantages as well as some associated risks, for instance
Advantages
Cost efficiency
The shift to a hosted cloud model eliminates a need to build hardware, install software or pay dedicated software license fees. By adopting cloud services, an organization can shift costs from capital to operational. This pay-per-use model provides greater
flexibility and eliminates the need for significant capital expenditures. Reduced IT administration and management cost.
Flexibility and rapid scalability (elasticity)
Rapid provisioning of resources enables an organization to benefit from Cloud Computing model efficiencies by addressing computing infrastructure needs quickly.
Business continuity
IT infrastructure management advantages offered by cloud computing model and server virtualization contribute to business continuity by providing an efficient mechanism for computing platform migration, upgrades, and recovery.
Risks and Challenges Security and data governance
Security and data governance concerns remain the most common roadblock to cloud computing model adaptation. However, there are several potential mitigation strategies, such as trusted cloud service provider, private cloud, and hybrid cloud.
Cost to build a Private Cloud
Cloud computing cost advantages are coming from an economy of scale, therefore small size clouds are much less economical than large ones making cost a potential limiting factor in private cloud adaptation.
Despite potential risks and challenges, the advantages and efficiencies provided by the cloud computing model are impossible to ignore. In order to better understand potential risk mitigation strategies, let’s quickly review what is a cloud computing exactly. In the big scheme of things, the cloud computing consists of a three major components — hardware, virtualization software and management components.
The last piece of the puzzle — management components is what makes the cloud different from just a bunch of servers running multiple virtualized environments. The idea of cloud management is to obfuscate the complexity of server infrastructure management from cloud users and administrators by giving them both simple and effective virtual server deployment and management tools. This is the key component which drives cloud efficiency up, the management tools ensure cloud’s elasticity.
Today, there are three common cloud types: private, public and hybrid clouds. What makes public and private clouds different is the way cloud resources are utilized — in a public cloud computing resources are shared among multiple tenants, in a private cloud all computing resources are used by a single tenant exclusively. Private cloud ensures clean cut isolation of a cloud tenant from other tenants. Although public cloud is much more attractive proposition from a cost perspective due to the fact that cloud computing benefit greatly from the economy of scale, data governance and privacy concerned organizations are naturally leaning more towards a private cloud approach.
What makes hybrid cloud such an interesting proposition from data governance risk mitigation perspective — it allows retaining data and the core application within secure and controlled hosting facility (in-house data center or a private cloud) while deploying application front-end to a hosted private or public cloud environment.
For example Database and back-office application server can be hosted in-house ensuring that all regulatory and data privacy requirements are met. While the Public Portal component is hosted by a 3rd party cloud hosting provider which carries a burden of maintaining the infrastructure which is required to support public web-based front-end, such as: network connectivity, network activity monitoring and intrusion detection, etc. This approach also benefits from one of the most attractive cloud computing features — elasticity, e.g. ability to adjust available computing resources on demand — increasing computational power if and when required and scaling it back when demand for computing resources drops.
