When you are asked to make the decision between cloud or colocated infrastructure, how will you know that you are making the right decision for your business?
The answer truly depends upon the type of infrastructure that you are operating and how important security is for your IT operations. Cloud provides the dynamic scalability of only paying for the resources you need at any given moment but also exposes you to the potential of dirty neighbors that can cause major security concerns.
When You Need Colocation
Your organization may have a requirement that your colocation infrastructure always be available. If your business already owns its servers, why not move those workloads to a colocated data center? If you have servers that must be available 24/7 and you already own the hardware, colocating your servers is probably a cost effective solution for your business. Colocation will always be more secure because your work loads exist on servers that are owned and operated by you and your files and data are not living on a shared environment.
When Cloud Makes Sense
As described above, cloud allows you to buy infrastructure when you need it. When you are able to only pay for infrastructure when you need it, your organization can save money by purchasing infrastructure when it is only necessary to have it. Think about your utility service that only bills you for the electricity that you use. That’s the same fashion in which cloud hosting will invoice your business.
Which is Right for You?
It really depends on the immediate needs of your organization. Some services may be better suited for data center colocation. Other workloads, that are not mission critical, may be better suited for a cloud hosted solution.
One added solution for cloud hosted workloads is that IaaS providers will typically provide you with the ability to backup your data across different data center sites. This can be imperative considering the fact that if one of the data centers you are using encounters an outage, you can easily spin up your virtual machines in another data center.
Making the Right Decision
It is always important to make the right decision concerning your colocation and cloud workloads. Some organizations aren’t comfortable using cloud systems to run their production workloads.
Many of these concerns stem from a hypothetical hypervisor breakout attack. Although this attack is feared by many cloud architects, there has not been a single confirmed case of this actually happening.
