Which is best?

There are hundreds and even thousands of offerings that offer services.  They come with a variety of names, vendors and offerings. Public cloud. Private cloud.  MSP. Azure. AWS. SaaS offerings. And so on.

Each has its own strengths, weaknesses, pitfalls and advantages.  And while almost everyone will say, “try it and see” the reality is that you probably have better things to do than be experimenting with different solutions and learning by your mistakes.

No matter what the “true believers” in any solution will tell you, there are times when keeping your solution in a standard Managed Service is the best solution.  There are times when one of the big cloud providers may be cheaper – and times when they are much more expensive.

How do I integrate?

Most companies end up with a variety of different cloud providers and many have part of their systems in the cloud and part in a hosted or managed services setup.   This can be for technical reasons – not every application can be run in the cloud. Or it can be for cost effectiveness or responsiveness or a host of other reasons.   Even companies that move almost totally to the cloud can end up with multiple cloud providers.

The question then becomes, how do you integrate these systems?  How do we make our processes work? How do we ensure that we can get a unified view of our data?  These are things that deliver the majority of the business benefits. Even if you save a few dollars by moving to the Cloud, what happens if you cannot get the data you need or the process integration to do your business in the most effective way?

What are your responsibilities?

Many companies are shocked to read the term “shared responsibilities” in their cloud contract.  For those who don’t miss it, it’s a warning signal that tells you that there are varying degrees of responsibility that you have for your applications, your support, and even your backup and recovery or security.  Companies who failed to understand this have had some rude surprises in terms of cost and lost reputation. This has resulted in security issues, data breaches and some costly sticker shock.

Some companies find that data charges made a simple cloud server costs more in one month than it would take to purchase your own server.  Others have discovered that simply moving to a cloud provider may provide the tools to manage security, but it didn’t mean that all their security policies and practices would magically appear.