Assess Your Needs

You can combine any of the many available cloud options for a cloud design that meets the particular needs of your organization. But how do you figure out which cloud approach best meets your unique needs and provides the best return on your investment?

Types of Cloud: Public, Private or Hybrid?

Public cloud models can accelerate development time lines, reduce up-front investment costs for new projects or provide temporary incremental processing power that can be scaled back when your needs die back. But private clouds can offer more control over the long term. Your best option depends on the following factors:

• Infrastructure readiness — The maturity of your IT infrastructure and processes affects your choice of cloud. How much have you virtualized your environment? Have you advanced beyond basic server consolidation into data center automation? If so, then you may be ready to start implementing a private cloud architecture.
• Regularity of demand — Do you have periodic spikes in demand (periods when you have to accommodate massive seasonal traffic) or regular reporting cycles? If so, a private cloud can reallocate internal resources as needed to avoid bottlenecks. A hybrid cloud approach can cost-effectively expand your private cloud into the public space when needed.
• Up-front investment versus immediate gratification — How does your current profit and loss forecast affect your choice? Should you devote resources to building your own cloud infrastructure for a long-term return, or do you need more immediate results?
• Privacy and security — The sensitivity of your data plays a large role in the type of cloud and cloud provider that is right for you. Using a public cloud can enhance transparency and scalability, but the security of using your own private cloud secured behind a firewall may outweigh the convenience of a public option. How do security considerations affect your strategy?

Types of Service: SaaS, PaaS, IaaS?

• Application usage — SaaS can provide rapid access to new capabilities while delivering your internal custom applications as a service can dramatically simplify development and maintenance requirements. Do your daily operations depend on large custom applications? How does routine maintenance affect those applications? Are you resourced to purchase and maintain the infrastructure those applications need?
• Elasticity — Do you need infrastructure on demand so that you can pay for computing resources only when you need them, without a massive hardware investment? IaaS offers flexibility and reliability with virtually no up-front investment.
• Speed of business — Do you want to free your IT staff to innovate on demand, without the complication and expense of acquiring the required hardware and software on-site and the flexibility of a highly collaborative environment where you can test outside the constraints of your own environment? PaaS lets you outsource hardware and software — as well as provisioning and hosting capabilities — so you can move faster.

Find your best path to the cloud. Dell™ Cloud Consulting Services can help you explore your business and IT circumstances and answer your cloud computing questions.