Hybrid IT and Cloud Computing

Hybrid IT and Cloud Computing

Hybrid IT and cloud computing allows a business to only have to deal with some resources in-house while others are provided externally. This could allow us to take advantage of the scalability and lower costs associated with a public cloud computing environment while allowing us to keep in-house any mission critical applications or customer data. We wouldn’t have to incur the costs of maintaining a separate data center as we can have most of the data that we keep be stored in the cloud. We can also have virtual servers which get rid of those hardware and maintenance costs that are associated with secure physical hardware. Some of the advantages and disadvantages are:

Advantages

• ·         Less maintenance as the servers and hardware would be managed by the provider

• ·         Continuous availability

• ·         Scalability as we only have to pay for what we need

• ·         Elasticity as our needs may change as our business progresses

Disadvantages

• ·         Less control as the provider would be managing our resources

• ·         We could run into restrictions on available applications, operating systems, and infrastructure options depending on who we use as our provider

Our business will have to incur the impact of higher costs if we choose to not use cloud computing. The costs of maintaining a data center and the relevant hardware can far out shadow the costs of moving to the cloud. My recommendation would be to take advantage of this technology to cut our costs and improve our infrastructure.