Cloud Infrastructure Hosting in a nutshell
The simple word „cloud“ is in everyone’s mouth within the business scene…
I don’t mean these private cloud features like we have it already for quite a while on tablet devices or mobile phone devices (sharing files across all devices) …
I mean the Cloud infrastructure services from big cloud hosting services like Amazon (Amazon Web Services) or Microsoft (Microsoft Azure).
More than 8 years ago some people (in my eyes very smart people… 😉 ) were already talking about this “rise of the cloud” and this will change the whole IT Business in total… and they were absolutely correct and every single IT-Service Provider needs to be aware of this change!
But what is this Cloud Infrastructure Service?
The basic idea behind the cloud infrastructure service is to create a simple service that enables customers to access IT resources in an easy and cost effective way.
Let me explain it with a small example:
There is a company which is really good in creating ideas and creating products out of these ideas which they will sell to customers. But like every company, they have a limited amount of resources or budget available to run their business…
This company will at least have the following tasks or you can also say “departments” 1. Ideas Development, 2. Product Development, 3. Product Manufacturing, 4. Sales, 5. Product Support 6. IT-Infrastructure, 7. IT-Infrastructure Support. The first 6 tasks are necessary to run the core business, that is actually the main reason for the existence of this company, but without IT it is almost impossible to run a business today, well, normally you also have task like basic administration like human ressources or something like that, but I will leave them out for this example to keep it simple.
So you can group these tasks to:
- Core Business tasks
- IT-Infrastructure tasks
And in traditional companies the amount of resource’s will be assigned like this:
So basically without IT, they cannot run their business, so they have to invest resources and budget into their IT-Infrastructure… things like: data centres, servers, software, licensing, managing and securing the IT-Infrastructure, so this will at least consume 40% of the whole resources of a company… well maybe it will take less effort if some of these tasks are already handle trough a service partner, but I will leave this scenario out for now, to keep it simple…
As soon as the business will grow, the requirements to the IT will also grow, which means the company needs to invest into their IT-Infrastructure… normally IT-Departments are struggling with these increased requirements and it takes them to long to serve this increase in time, the IT-Department needs to order the servers, they need to get installed in the data centers, the servers need to get installed in terms of software, the applications need to get configured, this takes time!
As soon as the IT-Department will have the servers up and running (3 months after the request of the business 😉 ) the company will experience that this was only a short peak within their business and the bigger requirements are gone since 2 months, but now the company already invested into their IT-Infrastructure… and what now?!
With a cloud infrastructure service this company could change their whole assignment of resources to this:
There is no need for: data centres, servers, software, licensing, managing and securing the IT-Infrastructure and stuff like this. The company only needs a small amount of IT resources to build and run the cloud service infrastructure. More resources to focus on the core business… and the next advantage is flexibility… the amount of the IT-Infrastructure can easily get adjusted to the business needs I mean: immediate scalability! So from the Business perspective this “rise of the cloud” is a huge opportunity!
People who are working in IT-Business immediatly need to adopt this rise of the cloud, because traditional IT is yesterday…
