As a Travel Technology company we have always been approached by clients who wants to know which hosting option they should opt for while looking at their OTA deployment stage. The options are between a cloud and data center and in this article we hope to give you some idea about their pros and cons.
The Cloud is not just another data center. It’s not hosting or the same thing as “time-sharing” either.
The Cloud can fail. It is even more vulnerable to certain events, like a cascading failure caused by another application in the same node that a segregated data center would not be. On the other hand, the leading cloud providers (Amazon, Google, Rackspace, Microsoft, etc.) put resources into creating a resilient architecture and monitoring that most businesses could never dream of, making Cloud significantly more resilient, reliable and secure than would be delivered by most standalone data centers supported by an internal IT staff.
But as we look at the battle between Cloud and the traditional data center, consider these points:
1. Capital Expenditure Vs. Operational Expenditure
If you build a data center, be prepared to write a big check and take time to procure & install the hardware. Cloud is pay as you go. This makes a big difference in cash flow, funding requirements (if you’re a start-up/early-stage company) and how quickly you can react to business growth.
2. Elasticity
You don’t buy capacity you pay for resources that you use. With the Cloud, computing resources are automatically provisioned to meet demand, but scale back (as does the cost) when demands ebbs.
3. Performance and latency
If you force a customer in Singapore hit a server in New Jersey (because that’s where your data center is), the latency in response and experienced performance by the customer suffers.
If you used the Cloud, you can have instances in different regions of the world that provide superior performance than a single data center could provide (of course you can build replicated data centers over the world, but that’s certainly not cheap).It will help to normalize the amount of computing resources you pay for and help keep costs… in addition to performance… more predictable.
4. Disaster recovery
With the Cloud, shifting the instance from one affected location to another is relatively fast and simple, and can be done in anticipation of catastrophic problems.
Summing up
Cloud is not perfect, but it does offer some significant advantages. Whether they are right for your company is an open question. And it’s not all technical questions. Business needs must be where the discussion begins. And IT owners must be honest with their evaluations of the technical advantages, but also of their own capabilities and personal agendas.
So as you can see, the decision of whether to adopt Cloud computing can be difficult to assess, but shouldn’t be further complicated based on a misunderstanding of what it really is!!
Author: Anoop .N
Anoop works as Delivery Manager in Teknokraaft.