Cloud or Data Center? Best Approach.

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Is Cloud a better choice or a Data Center? Yes. the answer is - it depends on you.. depends on your requirements and in some cases it is the co-ordination of both. We will see some of the factors which lead us to decide the good choice of it.

Data Center and Cloud

Data Center is on-premise hardware that stores data within an organization’s local network. Datacenter has the collection of physical devices like servers, storage, routers, switches, firewall, cables, etc. The Datacenter is managed and maintained by the IT administrators, normally employed by an organization. The organization will be fully responsible for their data. IT Administrator is responsible for setting up the connectivity between physical devices, install, configure, maintain all the software. They take daily backups and store them locally.

Cloud is an off-premise computing environment which stores data in cloud providers like Amazon AWS, MS Azure, Google GCP, etc. This normally works in the shared responsibility model. Setting up the connectivity between the devices or maintaining the physical devices are responsibilities of the cloud provider, this is already done and not visible to the customers. IT administrators of the organization takes care of the rest of the operations like the installation of the operating systems or application. He installs the operating system from the OS templates provided by the cloud provider. Patching the operating system and maintaining the application is the organisation’s responsibility.

• Infrastructure Cost
• Resource Pricing
• Scaling the Resource
• Business Agility
• IT Compliances

Infrastructure Cost

Cloud: In the cloud, Infrastructure investment cost is nil since you don’t pay anything to set up your IT environment. You only have to set up an account in the cloud vendors portal and you are ready to go. You are provided with web console using which virtual operating system or any other service can be made available to you. Most of the vendors give free access or credit for a limited period. This makes a cloud a better choice.

Data Center: On the other hand, in a Data Center you will shell out a lot of money as infrastructure investment. IT manager plans the life cycle of the setup, maybe a few decades, and procures the devices. The percentage of utilization of the resources is very less during the initial year, yet pays money for that. IT manager will be worrying about this Capex investment. Also, he will be worrying about the annual maintenance of hardware, the life span of the devices, etc.

Resource Pricing

Cloud: There is no upfront cost. You pay only for the service you use. Normally services are charged per hour though there are a few exceptions for this. Nowadays cloud providers provide many services like virtual machines, DNS, databases, firewalls, etc. Cloud vendors provide their platform for third-party vendors to sell their customized products. You can see the number of these customized applications that are increasing day by day.

Data Center: Since all devices are purchased by the organization, IT admins have the full freedom to use the resource till the maximum capacity is reached. Softwares can be either open source or commercial. Most of the commercial software runs with an annual subscription and their licensing terms.

Scaling the Resource

Cloud: This is the biggest advantage of the cloud where the service access is unlimited. Imagine that your company plans for a flash sale of a product that can increase the traffic by hundreds fold. Cloud can spin up the virtual machines based on the requirement of your application. And the very next moment once the flash sale ends, the number of virtual machines falls back to its original size. You will be charged only for the virtual machines-hours used.

Data Center: Company cannot plan of the above experiment since the resources procured will be limited and planned only for a few years' requirements. So the management fails to bring their business ideas to put into practice.

Business Agility

Cloud: This is another factor that makes cloud more attractive. Resources available are virtually unlimited. Business ideas can be launched with a lesser span of time. Though the business unit is optimistic about their ideas, a failure could cost them a lesser amount of resources as there is no upfront cost involved.

Data Center: The purchase of an additional device is not an easy process in Data Center since it has to go through various levels of approval. No wonder it takes months together.

IT Compliances

Cloud: This is one of the reasons for the willy-nilly adoption of the cloud for many. There are IT compliances which demand the data should not be stored out of the country. They want data encryption at rest.

Data Center: Since IT admin has full freedom, many feel that datacenter could bring a better solution, since they can make sure that data doesn’t go out of their organization. Also taking the offline backup retention is easy.

Conclusion:

We have discussed the factor to decide the better choice for the IT infrastructure. Though the cloud is a better choice for most of the cases there are a few cases organizations prefer Data Center. Some execute with the co-ordination of both.