Which cloud service is right for my organization?
Microsoft prides itself in providing three base offerings of cloud services: Private, Hybrid and Public. All three have their advantages and so organizations must do their due diligence to ensure the best fitting option is chosen. Ensuring the right fit for your organizations implementation will appease executives, will help increase employee productivity and if done correctly will allow for growth.
A Private Cloud offering, consisting of a Windows Server 2012 implementation, is one that is most prevalent in organizations today. Consisting of a room of servers on premise, possibly managed by System Center Configuration Manager 2012 and coupled with a solid security strategy, will ensure privacy of all information kept. Adhering to the "one box per service" logic in medium to large organizations may prove costly hardware wise. To add, real-estate of said servers may surpass current holdings and the cost of relocation on its own accord might cause headaches financially.
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Hybrid Cloud offerings are increasing in popularity as the cost of implementing a Hyper-V solution is virtually NIL and better utilizes hardware organizations have invested in or plans to migrate to. Allowing the services to dip into a pool of available hardware resources provides IT professionals better control and insures all data is housed on premise. The Hybrid Cloud's only limitation, would be hardware constraints should an organization outgrow its current hardware resources.
Public Cloud offerings are not as new as many people believe. This solution takes cues from mainframe implementations from yesteryear and modernizes them utilizing Internet ingenuity. As mentioned earlier, interest has grown around the Windows Azure FREE 90-Day Trial Offer by all sizes of organizations interested in hosting and accessing all its data without the worry of hardware limitations. While it has been noted that some IT professionals fear the coming of cloud computing, those who embrace it find the ability to save time on maintenance, allow for more time spent on strategic objectives, adding value to the organization and furthering your career.
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