Migrating your infrastructure from on-premise to Private Cloud will allow you to focus on your core business, without wasting efforts and money on managing and maintaining your own in-house IT infrastructure. Unlike most Public Cloud solutions, a private cloud environment, as those we design at Stackscale, allows more specific and custom configurations, making the migration easier. This way, you can keep an exclusive setup while taking advantage of the benefits of going into the cloud.
Is your company considering outsourcing its IT infrastructure? Keep reading to discover why switching from in-house servers to a Private Cloud is probably the most logical move — to keep growing efficiently while keeping data safe. Let’s go through the key advantages of migrating from on-premise to a private cloud environment.
In a private cloud environment you will not share your resources with anyone else; so no need to worry about oversubscription and noisy neighbors. This dedicated solution combines the benefits of service and architecture design with the advantages of outsourcing your infrastructure. You will still be able to design your exclusive environment according to your needs, while your private cloud service provider takes care of its hosting and management.
Scale as your computing needs grow or decrease
You can scale your Private Cloud as your computing needs grow or decrease. It is easier and less expensive than scaling an on-premise infrastructure; and deployment time is much shorter. Private Cloud allows you to scale resources quickly to manage big, unexpected peaks in traffic and usage, and it also works the other way around. If, at some point, you realize you need less resources than expected, you can also scale down easily.
For instance, at Stackscale, you can start with a plan of a 128 GiB RAM node, and scale easily by adding extra computing nodes on demand, without downtime. Our computing nodes are connected through bottleneck-free 40Gbps links, which we combine with a redundant, low-latency network storage to achieve high performance and availability.
High-availability & reliability
Private cloud solutions offer high-availability — guaranteed by SLA —, so that your services are not disrupted, not even by heavy workloads. You can even choose to deploy your environment across several data centers, minimizing risks of downtime thanks to the geo-replication of the infrastructure. Furthermore, private cloud environments are extremely reliable. Service providers like Stackscale usually monitor environments to control that everything works correctly and to address potential issues and threats as soon as they appear.
Minimum latency
Outsourcing your IT infrastructure will also allow you to reduce latency. You can benefit from your private cloud provider’s Points of Presence (PoP), interconnections and datacenter locations to host your data and applications closer to your potential customers. Moreover, some cloud service providers also offer CDN solutions so that you can have replicas of your data around the world, to deliver your content or service faster and more efficiently.
Improved security and redundancy
Security should not be a concern when thinking about outsourcing your IT infrastructure. Since, as opposed to what many people might think, on-premise infrastructures are not necessarily the most secure choice. Private Cloud service providers hire the best professionals to monitor, manage and secure their infrastructure. They are specialized in building highly-secured and reliable environments; keeping the risk of disruptions in your services to a minimum. Besides, they usually offer Disaster Recovery solutions to make DR planning easier for companies.
Moreover, cloud providers implement numerous security measures — both at resources (nodes, storage arrays, systems…) level and at data center level — to guarantee the highest level of security and privacy. At Stackscale, for instance, we host our infrastructure in highly secured data centers — with 24/7 physical security, biometric scanners and card readers, among others. Keeping physical security to such a high standard at an on-premise data center would incur exorbitant expenses.
Control over your data and applications
Although outsourcing your hosting means sharing control of the data, it does not mean you will lose control over it. You will maintain full control over your software, unless you wish to delegate some of your system administration as well. In fact, since a private cloud environment is exclusively dedicated to your company, you can decide who you authorize to access it. In terms of compliance with regulations (GDPR, ISO…) the Private Cloud is more suitable for highly-regulated industries such as healthcare and banking.
However, to ensure the highest security level possible, it is important to keep in mind that security is a two-way street. While the private cloud provider is responsible for ensuring that the infrastructure, storage, availability and networking are completely secure from their end, customers must take responsibility for other aspects, such as identity and access management, encryption or network traffic protection.
Disaster Recovery & contingencies
Regarding hazards, Private Cloud is often much more secure (and affordable) than on-premise infrastructures. The data centers where ISPs host their infrastructure implement a lot of security and redundancy measures to ensure the continuous functioning of the hosted systems. Moreover, most private cloud providers offer DR and backup solutions to ensure data recovery in case of a hardware failure or natural disaster.
Legacy applications
Furthermore, a private cloud environment is most suitable when working with legacy systems and applications. Unlike most public cloud solutions, a Private Cloud allows more specific and custom configurations, enabling legacy applications to run unmodified, if needed.
Cost savings
Cost management must be approached differently when moving off-premises. Fast provisioning in the cloud must be properly managed to keep control of costs over time. As we explain in our article about the cost savings of migrating to the cloud, cost reduction is one of the motivations to migrate to the cloud. Companies can forget about huge investments and upfront capital expenses on computer hardware!
On this matter, the Private Cloud will not only considerably decrease your initial capital investment (CAPEX), but also operational costs (OPEX). Private cloud solutions are based on a pay-per-use model, which is more cost-efficient and avoids wasting resources. Your hosting expenses will therefore be predictable and recurring monthly costs.
Moreover, cloud service providers are in charge of managing and maintaining the infrastructure. So, there is no need to invest in on-premise infrastructure and specialized staff; and maintenance and management workloads are much lower. Besides, as we mentioned when talking about the security benefits, Private Cloud allows you to keep logical and physical security to a high standard, at a reasonable cost.
IT workload
A hosted private cloud environment is a good choice for medium and large businesses willing to offload some of their IT workload. Migrating your infrastructure to a Private Cloud allows your technical team to focus on tasks which are more critical to your core business, such as CRM or ERP.
Your IT staff will still be in charge of customizing your Private Cloud and managing the Operating System and the application layer. But your service provider will be responsible for deploying the environment, running the network, maintaining the hardware and hosting the infrastructure, among other things. In other words, apart from your own team, you will also count on your provider’s specialized team. Thus they can work together when facing an issue or need.
Expertise & support
Outsourcing your infrastructure to a private cloud service provider also means taking advantage of the provider’s expertise and support. At Stackscale, we offer direct access to specialized technical support and our expertise defines everything we do: from our 24/7 system monitoring — thanks to our automation and monitoring platform — to our carefully chosen technology.
To sum up, the benefits of moving to a private cloud environment are numerous. It allows a more agile management of your IT needs and greater flexibility to grow; without wasting resources.
So, if you are considering migrating to a dedicated cloud, do not hesitate to contact our cloud computing experts for more information. Every project is unique, so it is important that you choose the solution that better fits your business strategy — both present and future. At Stackscale we provide businesses with a customized solution and the possibility to explore potential enhancements to support their business goals.
