I often get asked by customers and partners what the differences are between traditional on-premise deployments, hosted, or the Microsoft Cloud - "Isn't hosted and cloud simply our servers running in someone else's datacenter?" To answer this, let's briefly break down the three very different deployment models:Traditional On-PremiseMany discussions have been going on for years on this, and for the better part of the past three decades this has been the model of choice for most business customers. Customers have full control over their entire infrastructure and can at any point physically walk over and touch their servers. While this is a great plus, at the same time you must plan for, maintain, and pay for all aspects of your infrastructure such as:
Even for some of the top IT firms in the world, this can easily be a business all on its own and become a significant overhead in cost and resources to the business.HostedSo in an effort to optimize and streamline operations, many CIOs are considering alternative options for basic workloads (email, secured IM, departmental collaboration) - one of the alternatives is to move to a hosted model. Essentially under hosted, your servers are in fact located in someone else's datacenter - your hosting partner of choice. There are advantages to this since it alleviates the need to have a full IT staff manage the day-to-day functions of these servers, but at the same time still provide you with relatively full control of the environment for any customization requirements.The degree of control you have may vary and depend largely on which hosting provider you choose, and this will in turn impact how much flexibility you can have. From a Microsoft customer perspective, there are generally two options for hosting - Partner Hosted or Microsoft Hosted. Most hosting partners will also offer add-on managed services to perform patch management and upgrade projects. However, the costs for these services are usually quite substantial and most hosting partners will only commit to being one version behind the current released platform. For many customers, this is still a significant improvement, and helps to free up operational IT resources for projects that visibly impact the business. Although at the end of the day, we are still left doing capacity planning and budgeting for capital costs every three to six years.CloudThis leads us "to the cloud". There has been a lot of buzz around the cloud and cloud computing for the masses, but what does it really mean for the business and what is the IT value proposition to move to this delivery model?According to Wikipedia:
Cloud computing refers to the provision of computational resources on demand via a computer network.
Cloud computing can be compared to the supply of electricity and gas, or the provision of telephone, television and postal services. All of these services are presented to the users in a simple way that is easy to understand without the users needing to know how the services are provided. This simplified view is called an abstraction. Similarly, cloud computing offers computer application developers and users an abstract view of services that simplifies and ignores much of the details and inner workings. A provider's offering of abstracted Internet services is often called "The Cloud".
In part two of this two-part entry, we will take a look at what the cloud is, why the hype, and explore in detail the benefits IT organizations can gain from the Microsoft Cloud.