Like so many other considerations, the type of data center that you offer to your customer requires a lot of thought. What are their exact needs? What sort of information are they storing? Who—and how many people—need access to that critical data? What are their cost-related concerns? And how secure do they need their information?
Both a traditional physical facility and a cloud data center service can be scaled or customized according to your customer’s needs. Plus, both offer security options to keep access restricted and protect information from intrusion; however, the differences between them make the choice far more complex.
Traditional vs Cloud Data Center: Weighing the Benefits
In choosing to house their data on a traditional or even collocated server, your customer gains a degree of control over their own environment. Unfortunately, this can be a mixed bag. Information is kept physically and digitally safe from harm insofar as they can secure it. The downside is the associated cost and involvement that it may take, as well as the potential downtime that they may still incur. Data is retained as a physical asset that must be manually managed, updated, and secured.
Conversely, when a customer turns to a cloud data center service, they give up some of that hands-on control, but can now focus on their actual business operations. Your customer can shed the conventional trappings of information management, instead outsourcing those efforts to you, a specialized provider that handles everything.
Again, there are benefits and drawbacks to each choice. In choosing whether to run a traditional or cloud data center service, your customer should consider their own organizational needs. What, after all, keeps their business running smoothly and safely?
Security
In a traditional data center, physical concerns are always in the back of one’s mind. Information that is so critical to a business is constantly susceptible to the whims of nature. Fire, flooding, storms, and outages can disrupt (at best) or devastate (at worst), wreaking havoc on disaster recovery efforts. And this is to say nothing about human influence, whether accidental or malicious, internal or external. Just by granting access to certain personnel for routine maintenance, your customer may potentially open their business data up to unforeseen risks.
By choosing to go with a traditional physical server implementation, they immediately put the onus on their team to keep their information and business functions safe. There needs to be a lock-and-key protocol for those systems. Concerns such as patch management and employee security competency are thrust to the forefront. Many times, these issues come way before other topics and decisions that need to be made.
This is one area that in which a cloud data center service can excel. Traditional disaster recovery concerns are reduced, as the nature of remote-hosted software on disparate, geographically diverse data centers means that the provider is the one to deal with operational, maintenance and headaches. This frees up your team to focus on many of the activities that help your business to thrive, all while not being bogged down by the latest threats. In the event of malicious activity or outage, your business information is kept safe and accessible. Another benefit is the potential for numerous encryption options and other security features, all automatic assuming you opt into the services offered. Make sure to read those SLA’s.
And for many businesses, having nonstop, secure access to their data is the only way in which they can thrive.
Scalability
Traditional data centers require manual maintenance, and not just for security. Growing a data center in a physical sense requires more extensive investment in equipment, more focus on maintaining those servers, and more dedicated personnel (or, at least, more tasks for their team) as they look to take scaling to the next level. More maintenance, more administration, and more headache. Furthermore, expanding a physical data center requires securing more assets than ever, and doing so against an increasingly savvy potential attacker.
Unlike physical servers, cloud data center service models can be custom-built to support scalability needs—no matter how big or small they are, or how much they change with time. You, the service provider, will handle all aspects of growth. You provide the equipment, upgrade capacity, size, and scope to support the customer’s business need—and all of it comes as part of a monthly subscription cost. This model extends flexibility in a way that one could never have with a traditional data center, allowing your customer to meet their unique requirements more easily—and purchase varying capacity over time as their demand changes.
Cost Efficiency
Let’s face it: whether your customer owns (traditional data center) or essentially rents (cloud data center) services, it can get pretty expensive.
By turning to the cloud for their data center needs; however, they can free up their financial resources by only spending exactly what is needed for coverage. Everything is outsourced; cost is limited strictly to the resources that they consume, with no additional expenses related to buying, upgrading, or maintaining equipment. The provider handles everything, and the customer pays only a subscription fee in return.
Despite these considerations, a cloud data center is not necessarily for everybody. Making that decision about what is best for the organization can be difficult … and the stakes are high.
Ultimately, your customer’s business decision should be based on many different factors: budget, scalability need, hands-on maintenance demand, and—more importantly than ever—cybersecurity. In today’s world, it is critical for your customers to have the personnel in place to handle oversight of their physical assets, if they want to manage their assets themselves.
For years, the problem with anything cloud-based was that it was more vulnerable to security issues. But in today’s world, with its strong demand for cybersecurity, most cloud service providers could not afford to stay in business without improving their security.
For most companies with elastic need, today’s cloud data center service offers the best balance of protection, cost efficiency, scalability, and more.
Curious how Quest Technology Management can help your organization as a partner—or a customer—with its lineup of services? Visit www.questsys.com or call 800-443-5605 to learn more.
