Cloud computing is one of this year’s hot topics. In a nutshell, it means locating your computing resources somewhere else, usually in a data centre run by a hosting company.
Many businesses are hoping that cloud computing will be a panacea to solve all the problems that appear to come from their computer room and all those troublesome servers.
However, even if your servers are located at some third party hosting site and managed by people who don’t work for you, those pesky problems may still occur and the overall costs may be less than owning and running your own servers.
Consultants from McKinsey & Co have produced a report which shows that moving your computing to the cloud could be a costly mistake. The McKinsey study, entitled “Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing” claims that outsourcing a typical data centre to the cloud could even double costs!
The report goes on to say that businesses could do better by running their own servers and using virtualisation to run them more efficiently. This approach may indeed hold the key to greater cost savings.
We at ISN tend to agree. While neither cloud computing or virtualisation will cure all corporate IT headaches, there is a place for both and, used to fulfill definite objectives, both can provide cost savings and better performing IT for businesses.
For instance, certain tedious but crucial tasks, like spam and virus filtering can be transferred to “the cloud” in the form of Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services for an insignificant cost and can deliver quick returns in terms of increased productivity and better security.
Similarly, our LiveVault online backup solution is a cloud-based application, which creates backups off site every 15 minutes at far less cost than an in-house solution could.
The cloud is fine for utility jobs like these, but the same approach doesn’t work so well for business critical applications where tighter control, flexibility and integration with other systems are high priorities. Costs of owning hardware are low in reality since they can be depreciated over several years or even written off against tax. Most organisations are having to get leaner in the way they use IT and server virtualisation is a clear way of squeezing more value out of your data centre.
We would welcome your opinions on this topic. Please leave a comment or email us.