According to the Cisco Cloud Index, 68 percent of the cloud workloads will be in public cloud data centers by 2020, which is a 35 percent jump from 2015. While that growth is impressive, what it doesn’t say is that many businesses are still trying to figure out the process of moving to the cloud. AWS, which currently holds about 40 percent of the market, clearly has a lot to offer. What is not as clear are the hidden costs of moving infrastructure to the cloud.
In many ways, businesses have moved beyond the “either/or” debate of Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) as evidenced by Microsoft’s fiscal Q3 2017 earnings report, which shows Azure revenue growth of 93 percent year over year. For an increasing number of businesses today, Azure plays an equal or even greater role in the cloud strategy of organizations that are also using AWS.
Last year, government agencies and businesses in the United States suffered losses from 1,093 reported data breaches. That number is likely higher due to the fact that these attacks are rarely spotted for months after the initial attack takes place. As Eva Casey Velasquez, chief executive officer of the Identity Theft Resource Center puts it, “this [number] is the best-case scenario.”
When it comes to small-business IT, more companies are moving parts of their IT infrastructure or even the whole thing to the cloud. Maximizing uptime, mobility on virtually any device, and the cost advantages are some of the more popular reasons to do so. Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) are the leading choices for cloud services, but businesses have a lot to consider when it comes to choosing the right one for their needs. This brief overview of each provider gives some insights that are important for small businesses to understand when making that decision.
According to IDC’s Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Spending Guide, small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) will contribute 40 percent of the projected $141 billion in spending on the public cloud by 2019. The dramatic growth in SMB public-cloud spending over the next few years will be fueled by the market-dominating leadership of Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Most managers and executives don’t spend too much time thinking about backup and recovery services. They trust that when they log into their computer, their data will be there just like it was when they left it the night before. However, this can be a dangerous way to approach business continuity with all of the different threats and issues that an organization faces these days.
Using virtual machines (VMs) in your infrastructure makes sense from a cost perspective, because physical server costs are lower and resources are used to their capacity. If additional resources are needed, a new server is simply spun up. The ease of maintenance also makes virtual servers attractive to most IT departments. If a VM should fail, you simply spin up a new one. However, in order for true continuity, you will need to ensure that the new server is restored from the one it replaced exactly.
Backups are considered one of the most vital of all IT functions. Without an effective backup strategy, your business is left vulnerable to data loss, but also to threats such as ransomware attacks. Not having the right backup strategy can also put your organization at risk of being out of compliance with the different regulations you need to adhere to.
OpenStack boosts business agility, availability, and efficiency by providing a platform with on-demand, resource pooling, self-service, highly elastic, and measured services capabilities. If this sounds like cloud computing, that’s because it is. OpenStack is basically your key to building your own cloud infrastructure.
Given the world we now live in, the need for reliable off-site backup of mission-critical business information is indisputable for all businesses. Small to medium-sized businesses and enterprises that manage a lot of data require scalable, secure, and cost-effective systems in order to manage, back up, and recover data from a network of computers with minimal user intervention. The challenge of finding the right managed backup services provider comes in understanding what your business should be considering in order to make the right choice.
