You carefully planned your company’s sales goals and budgets for last year. You and your team planned your internal network. You’ve decided to make the move to Cloud computing. You planned that, too, right? Did you choose a public Cloud solution, a private one, or a hybrid of the two? Cloud computing is its own architecture and you need to plan for your move to Cloud computing just like you plan everything else.
The three types of Cloud architecture are: public, private, and a hybrid. Public Cloud architecture is readily available from vendors such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure (Azure), and Google Compute Engine (Google). You purchase space and access on their servers, create virtual machines in their environment, and use the extra space for application sharing, database access, or file storage. Using a public Cloud solution off-loads the capitalization costs of new servers and operations expenses of additional internal IT maintenance costs and work.
Capitalization and operation costs are only one consideration in designing your Cloud architecture to meet your needs. Many industries have internal and governmental regulations surrounding where and how sensitive data can be stored and accessed. Security concerns can be handled with public Cloud configurations, or with a private Cloud. Private Cloud configurations ensure that you are in control of the security for all your data assets. Cost savings that could be available using a public Cloud solution may not be available with the hardware and maintenance costs of a private Cloud solution. However, security of sensitive data is always worth the cost and inconvenience of protecting your clients from potential data leaks.
Security isn’t the only concern when building a Cloud architecture solution. Latency, availability, and maintenance costs are also things to consider when including Cloud architecture in your network.
Balancing the outsourcing cost benefits of a public Cloud solution and the tight control benefits of a private Cloud solution can be found in the hybrid Cloud model. A hybrid Cloud architecture uses both public and private Cloud solutions to meet the needs of your data and application networks. The private Cloud handles the data requiring higher security and you can leverage the cost benefits of the public Cloud to run applications. Your business is unique and your Cloud solution should be, too.
Latency and availability are always a concern when network resources are delivered over the Internet. Setting the physical location of your servers closer to your end users can reduce latency, but even the largest network can’t put a server close to every end user around the globe. DNS traffic management reduces latency by sending traffic requests to the closest Cloud resource. It can also route traffic to available resources when the closest server isn’t able to deliver data. No matter what Cloud architecture solution is the right decision for your company, all Cloud solutions can benefit from DNS traffic management available from NS1.
For a deeper dive on these ideas and some best practices for getting the job done, check out our White Paper on the subject, entitled "Migrating To The Cloud? What You Should Consider". As always, our team is happy to talk shop around making the Cloud work for you, so don't hesitate to reach out.