Hosting vs. Cloud & Humans vs. Machines
As VP of Sales and Marketing at CloudOps, I am often explaining the difference between cloud and hosting. My goal is to effectively guide clients to get the maximum business value out of cloud infrastructure services. The greatest business value from cloud is the business agility and efficiency it can enable. I have laid out four items I would want to know if I were starting to use cloud.
Continuously right-size IT
With cloud, you are only paying for what you need, when you need it, instead of wasting money on unused capacity. If your needs increase or decrease, you can adjust accordingly. With cloud, time and money are not wasted waiting to make the adjustments.
Confusion – Cloud vs. hosting
Cloud is often confused with hosting and everyone is trying to cloud-wash their hosting services. People who provide hosting services lock customers in to committed capacity for their peaks, often citing risk, security and performance. With cloud, customers can avoid committing to capacity out of fear they might need it, and only commit to what they need when they need it. Cloud providers let customers scale up capacity on-demand. Clouds providers can also offer incentives to make long-term commitments for the capacity customers know they need. This is frequently described as “leasing the base and renting the peaks.” In Amazon’s AWS, they refer to it as Reserved Instances. With cloud.ca we offer something similar but simplified.
Multi-tenant – Business risk?
The economic benefits of a shared multi-tenant infrastructure are significant. The operational issues that arise when a shared environment is not implemented and managed properly can be extremely costly. We make sure our solutions balance the economic benefits of multi-tenancy with the controls required for the security, performance and reliability of your business critical applications.
Keep it separated – Humans vs. machine
Hosting tends to blend in man-hours/effort and machine infrastructure costs. We believe customers should keep infrastructure services separate from managed services and provide a simplified billing model for both.
For our managed (human) services (24X7 monitoring, maintaining and patching your application platform), we ask for a long-term commitment, but for machine services (storage, networking and compute), we believe your business can benefit from not being locked in to a specific vendor or region. If tomorrow you want to move to running on different clouds in Europe, China, or US, our humans can help, even if you are not using our machines (cloud.ca).
