Save Money on IT Infrastructures

Reduce IT Infrastructure Costs

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is less known to the general public since it is usually addresses large companies' needs, rather than individuals'. However, IaaS services have a lot to offer to even small companies and could reduce IT costs significantly. In this post, I'll try to elaborate about this topic to help you save money on unnecessary in-house IT infrastructures.



As I've mentioned in the Cloud-up your business post, IaaS is related to IT infrastructure services that can be bought, or rented, over the Internet. For those who needs it most, this definition means nothing. In order to simplify it, here are some examples of infrastructures that are in use in businesses: storage, network services, security appliances and databases.

But how could you use export your organization storage, or network services, to the cloud?

Imagine that your business required 1TB of storage in 2008 to archive all invoices, customers' data, internal documents, accounting reports and so on. If you want a reliable way to store all this important data, and to allow access to it from every where, you would have to do the following:
(1) Buy at least 2 hard-drives (for redundancy) of 3 TB each (to allow future growth)
(2) Install it in a secure and appropriate place (so nobody would be able to steal it, or just accidentally trip over it)
(3) Connect it to the business network (using another computer or a router)
(4) Configure everything
(5) Define security policy and how to enforce it
(6) Routinely maintain the disks so it won't get fragmented (which affects speed and performance)
(7) Install UPS to the storage and network devices to allow availability in case of a power failure

Having done all this, and you still left with a major problem - if there are more than one physical locations for your office, or you wish to work from home, in every problem that may happen from those HDs to the remote location, you will loose your ability to work. If the UPS is down, if the cleaning lady/guy broke something by mistake, if the router has malfunctioned, if there are too many people accessing the HD at once, if...    All would damage your work in the short run, and make you loose customers and business opportunities in the long run.

Using the alternative cloud-based storage is done as follows:
(1) Select your preferable service provider (such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazone Web Services, etc.)
(2) Sign-up for the service
(3) Configure all devices to work with the selected service
(4) Go to a happy-hour-beer-serving bar and watch a Euro 2012 football match

In this way, you would never have to worry about maintenance, or possible failures. As long as you have an Internet connection, you will always be able to access your business data. The IaaS service provider companies will take care of the rest - matinating the health of their storage device, the security policy, backups, replacing malfunctioned hardware, iron your shirts, and so one. And all for just a few dollars per month. Amazing, isn't it?!

This is also applied for network services, which allows you to set a secured network for your organization, without installing your own modems and routers from point-to-point. ISP are using advanced network technologies such as MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) to set-up Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) according to their customers' needs and specifications. These VPNs acts as private networks for organizations and businesses allowing them to control traffic, ensure quality-of-service to end-users, enforce security policy and more. Before that, companies needed to install their own network appliance to benefit from these services. Nowadays, it is all one phone call  away from being "installed" in your company and starting to save you money and increase your efficiency.

You can use Cloudorado, or alternative comparison websites, to compare between some of the IaaS providers.

The main takeaway is that almost everything can be bought/rented as a cloud service. All that needs to be done is to define the specifications of your needs and find the appropriate provider.


NinjaCloud

The parts that make up a greater whole

When referencing the Cloud there are in fact two categories that fall under the general term. Cloud Computing and Cloud Storage, though both in the Cloud, are entirely different services; one providing the processing power and program usage presently found on PC's, while the other is a storage of data facility. Either can be used independently of the other and so it is worthwhile to consider them separately. For the purposes of this blog, however, we will generally talk of the Cloud as a single entity. Realizing that as the adoption of Cloud Computing and Cloud Storage become the norm, the ubiquitous nature of the Cloud will reduce the differentiation of its separate parts. Just as normal users of PC's see memory and processing not as tangential things but indistinguishable parts of a whole, so to will the separate aspects of the Cloud be overlooked as its use becomes more widespread.

Introduction to Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing is probably one of the most popular technological innovation of our decade. One of the most exciting things about it is that anyone can enjoy from its benefits, individuals and enterprises as one.

Cloud Computing is not a totally new concept, it is basically an elaboration and development of an old concept - mainframe-terminal computing - that was invented more than 50 years ago.

Few years later, In the early 80's, personal computers became cheaper and cheaper and allowed the use of local storage and processing power in order to complete day-to-day computing assignments. This caused the elimination of terminals and mainframes almost entirely.

However, in the past 5 years we are witnessing a major change back towards centralized resources. Storage as well and processing resources can be used by many end-users from all around the world in a much effective manner than it was in the years before that. The main facilitator of the recent transformation is the massive growth in the Internet bandwidth.

People are now, more than ever, are using their PC (or MAC.) only as a portal and an interface to the content, personal and private, which is found on the Internet. Enterprises have also joined the revolution and are currently investing large amounts of resources in order to replace their present IT infrastructures with cloud-based servers and network.

In our following posts we will address many topics related to Cloud Computing; pros and cons, market, products, security issues, etc.

See you all soon.

The Ninja Cloud