Ask a roomful of business executives how many of them want to be in the business of managing network servers and it’s a good chance that no hands will go up. It’s not that managing servers is a terrible, onerous thing to do, it’s just not the business that most business executives are in. Most would prefer to concentrate on their business and let technology people worry about the technology.
This is what gave rise to “hosting” services and “co-location” facilities where companies can have a technology company house and manage their network servers. It has also given rise to a generation of CSPs, Cloud Service Providers who deliver “server” from a remote data center that they manage.
Better Service, and it Costs Less!
Another thing executives like more about getting “server” from the cloud is that it can cost less. “Server Virtualization” has let us pack more than one “instance” of the network server operating system run on a large, well-equipped piece of server hardware. In fact, you can now have dozens of servers running on one machine. That also means that several companies can house their servers on that machine at the same time. Cloud Service Providers deliver this “multi-tenant” server capability and can charge each customer less than it would ordinarily cost them to run their own server.
Where, oh Where Should My Servers Be?
You may now be asking, “So where’s the best place to put my servers?”
The answer is based more on policy and politics than technology. Some financial institutions have a strict policy which says that it is their fiduciary responsibility to have all financial data reside on servers and storage housed within their own four walls. From a practical standpoint, once those servers are connected to the internet it could be argued that those four walls have been pierced, but the policy prevails.
Some applications may require the kind of interaction between servers, memory, and storage that can only be accomplished across the internal bus of a “cluster” which would mean everything had to be in the same place.
But with today’s communication technology your servers can in most cases be located anywhere… and everywhere. You can have servers on your own premises and mix them with space on multi-tenant servers at a cloud service provider’s facilities. You can use public cloud servers for certain services and mix in private cloud servers where appropriate.
How Will Our People Know Where the Servers Are?
They don’t have to. Some worry that they can’t have their people signing into many different servers and services at clouds located all over the place. One of the five primary characteristics of cloud computing as defined by the National Institute for Standards & Technology (NIST) calls for a sense of placelessness, and a layer of abstraction that allows users to access whatever they need from a simple self-service portal without having to know where the resources are actually physically located. Special technology like Microsoft’s Active Directory automate these processes. With versions for your on-premise servers talking to versions for cloud-located servers, Active Directory syncs everything and everybody up so users can log in once and access everything without any clue as to where anything actually is.
Are Cloud Servers Secure?
In a word, yes. It’s critical to be demanding of your cloud service providers and make sure they document their security processes and policies, but many studies are now showing that, in many cases, cloud users are happier with their security than on-premise environments. Major players are making major investments in assuring the security of your data and apps. You can increase the security by making sure to encrypt your data at all times, whether it’s at rest in storage or in transit from your facility to the cloud to your customers or anywhere else.
What Next?
The process of moving from on-premise servers to cloud-based servers can go as slowly or as quickly as you like. You can take the right amount of time to properly plan how to transition so you save the maximum on your annual IT spend while enjoying the best possible service levels.
The key is to engage experts to help you assess all of your data assets, applications, and other resources to determine what should be moved when. They have the experience and knowhow to help you map out your most cost-effective, safe, secure strategy. To learn more about how Genesis10 IT Managed Services approaches on-premise and cloud-deployed servers in a hybrid environment, give us a call today.