The principle of Public cloud is to have a solution residing on a resilient cloud provider structure. Using cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services AWS or Microsoft Azure platforms. These benefit from utilising the Infrastructure as a Service IaaS solutions, Platform as a Service PaaS and Software as a Service SaaS. This can be a hybrid model that compliments the solution provided on your in house infrastructure through a secure VPN tunnel or full cloud based solutions. Both require a VPN from your internal network but logically become as if provided onsite. These solutions can also be used to provide a DMZ based environment to secure your backend data from a front end service such as a Web Portal or Online SharePoint.
Example setup of Hybrid Public and Private cloud
With the advances in these areas now make this a very main stream solution. Utilising not just the compute of a private cloud for servers but also the virtual networking and load balancing principles previously only available to in-house solutions. Utilising cloud solutions reduces the footprint of in-house resource like energy concerns, fire suppression, UPS's to maintain uptime in event of power failure. These concerns are all dealt with by the cloud provider.
Some examples of use
Backup destination offsite into a secure location (This can also be provided through a Veeam cloud provider if an alternative is required.
Web Portals
Hybrid use for Business Continuity purposes (Replicated key services into the cloud to safeguard against loss of internal services)
Geographically positioned storage
Full offsite infrastructure solutions
Along side there are also private cloud solutions, these can also be advantageous to your environment. The advantage of Private cloud is control of the environment the solutions reside on. This stretches your environment over geographically diverse resource pools. These are managed by less mass market solutions providers however offer large benefits. As these are controlled by the business and the data recovery points can be altered to suit every business requirement. These are the same as stretching your current infrastructure into physical multisite offerings with the benefit of a single logical setup. This means you have the control of all the servers and where they sit in terms of storage and compute and will only move location if required. These solutions require a large amount of design so best to match the need of the business.
Please contact Tractive Solutions Ltd for more information and we will be happy to discuss the options and which is best for what is required. Not all solutions fit the needs for all businesses and these need to be engineered carefully.
