Choosing A Service For Cloud Outsourcing

There are certain criteria that vendors look at to determine whether a particular service is a good candidate for cloud outsourcing.

The strategy that we follow is:

We see the non-critical apps first and look at what really becomes disruptive when moved out of the company’s existing private environment. There is also a possibility of recommending public cloud or a private cloud on a managed hosting model.

Cloud computing is the next logical extension for the managed hosting providers. They have been offering services on the conventional managed hosting model for some five – seven years after evolving from just being a hosting provider. I am referring to the Infrastructure service providers because that’s where the action is right now. The large enterprises are going more for IaaS.

Be it any geography globally, any managed service hosting provider is ready to provide an on-demand operational cost based model - be it in a private cloud, where the cost is on a monthly basis and not pay per use, whether the capacity is used or not. It will be a kind of a cloud arrangement coupled with the outsourcing benefits and also retaining the output of the current capex investments. This results in saving on the cost of the capital.

There have been instances when clients have gone for such operational arrangements. Many are high end, using complex systems. Most of them begin with demands for a private cloud in terms of how can they optimise their datacentres; move applications onto the cloud with capacities as elastic as possible because elasticity in a private cloud is limited. It depends on the amount of investment the client is ready to put in. It’s like a datacentre but it’s relatively more automated.

Cloud Service Provider (CSP) like Amazon cannot provide a similar private cloud combination because they have a large cloud infrastructure. A virtual private cloud (VPC) is the most they can offer, which is like a logical private cloud.