The importance of owning your remote servers and using a dedicated protected cloud.

If you’re a business owner, then there’s a good chance this question must have crossed your mind to own your equipment and servers. Just remember, “owning” your equipment doesn’t mean the computers and systems in your office. Likely, you are already using a hosting web service or server for your business needs. After carefully considering your unique business needs, it would be best if you decided between onsite or off-site servers. Read along, and we’ll make the decision easy for you.

Onsite servers to Off-site servers; The trend

In 2021 more than 50% of the organizations moved their workloads to off-site or cloud servers. Managed service companies (MSPs) and value-added resellers (VARs) are gaining traction with their one size fits all solutions. Keeping an onsite physical server and equipment and maintaining the infrastructure is costly. But there are other reasons motivating businesses to move to an off-site setting.

• Onsite hosting has limited connectivity and accessibility than off-site hosting, which has unlimited capabilities.
• Remote and geographic expansion are more realistic in an off-site and cloud environment.
• The physical space of onsite housing servers incurs real estate and energy charges; off-site servers do not.
• Storing your data in a colocation datacenter is cost-effective, removing the need for in-house IT costs.
• The upfront costs of the physical equipment and server are significant for most businesses.

These technology barrier costs are causing the shift to datacenter solutions or dedicated off-site servers. Put, a datacenter solution or dedicated server is an option dedicated solely to your business needs and purposes. No other individual can access the server; it’s your data in our datacenter.

A closer look at AWS servers

The most popular dedicated off-site solution is Amazon web services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platforms. But how do you choose what’s best for your business? They all follow the pay-per-user approach and additional services and products needed over time, adding to costs as you grow.

Since AWS dominates the field, we will focus on just Amazon’s platform. The first thing to consider is that “You want solutions, not a platform.” For example, Office365 is a solution to edit and create documents, while Microsoft Azure is the cloud platform that hosts 365 and other programs online. Thus Amazon is a platform – not a solution. Amazon gives you cloud space for rent, with unpredictable costs as your business needs rise and fall.

You will not see an automatic performance improvement when you move your company’s workflow and applications into AWS. For that, you would need a dedicated protected-cloud environment and an intelligent, distributed database. Just hosting your applications on AWS does not mean you will have the ability to use those programs and computing resources efficiently. You have to meet AWS system requirements; AWS does not have to meet yours. If you want data backups and recovery, you have to do it yourself.

With AWS, Azure, and other popular server options, you only get a Virtual Machine (VM) and a console to work from. It is your responsibility to manage, maintain, and secure that VM. For example, with AWS, someone has to customize the CPU utilization limits, check to ensure the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume doesn’t hit the IOPS or throughput limits, and increase your read or write performance using parallelization. It sounds like more of a problem than a solution

Also, it has been proven that AWS cloud is not as secure as your datacenter. The world JUST experienced an AWS outage, interrupting the operations for thousands of people and loss of business downright. Not only do you lose flexibility and cost-effective scalability with AWS and Azure. But you lose the reliability and stability you thought you were getting with the Amazon and Microsoft name.

The bottom line is if you work with GPU, AI, or large data sets, you need someone to manage and personalize your IT infrastructure. Moving to a dedicated protected cloud solution lets you customize the server environment to improve AWS.

What is the alternative?

With a dedicated protected cloud, someone constantly monitors your private environment to make sure everything goes smoothly and is customized to the company’s requirements. Actual IT management means knowing when to optimize the storage and network layers to support your extensive data set. Unlike AWS and Azure who will slow down your traffic moving between VM’s –unless you pay additional fees – we can help optimize applications to respond to requests made to these large data sets in a remote environment, with no extra cost.

Before anything, we always have an expert examine the applications a business uses, how exactly employees use those applications in a daily workflow and finally review the data loads involved to figure out what needs to be done to make this run properly. Having a team that understands and develops personalized Technology Improvement Plans (TIP) gets your business more bang for the buck than AWS or on-prem.

This is the gist of overall performance, Bottom line? You want to opt for a service that offers 99.99% uptime with reliable IT support. We improve the environment to give you the best performance for your workload. Not the opposite way around. For example, for a single client, we don’t have to tune the S2D. But we do because we have it and want to give them the best performance possible.

Check out our post on how dedicated servers are a safer alternative. But that doesn’t mean you are 100% safe from attackers. To ensure the safety of the data, consider providers with built-in features like Application Outage Avoidance (AOA) and complete network monitoring to handle issues before they are critical…

So, despite all of the above facts, if you’re still crazy enough to go with AWS cloud, that’s your decision. Irrespectively, if you’re not terrified by the lower and fixed price complete solution, best infrastructure setup and system monitoring, or our team doing the magic for your business, in that case, we at Protected Harbor will be more than happy to give you all the solutions you need.

Virtualization vs cloud computing

Cloud computing and virtualization are both technologies that were developed to maximize the use of computing resources while reducing the cost of those resources. They are also mentioned frequently when discussing high availability and redundancy. While it is not uncommon to hear people discuss them interchangeably; they are very different approaches to solving the problem of maximizing the use of available resources. They differ in many ways and that also leads to some important considerations when selecting between the two.

Virtualization: More Servers on the Same Hardware

It used to be that if you needed more computing power for an application, you had to purchase additional hardware. Redundancy systems were based on having duplicate hardware sitting in standby mode in case something should fail. The problem was that as CPUs grew more powerful and had more than one core, a lot of computing resources were going unused. This obviously costs companies a great deal of money. Enter virtualization. Simply stated, virtualization is a technique that allows you to run more than one server on the same hardware. Typically, one server is the host server and controls the access to the physical server’s resources. One or more virtual servers then run within containers provided by the host server. The container is transparent to the virtual server so the operating system does not need to be aware of the virtual environment. This allows the server to be consolidated which reduces hardware costs. Less physical servers also mean less power which further reduces cost. Most virtualization systems allow the virtual servers to be easily moved from one physical host to another. This makes it very simple for system administrators to reconfigure the servers based on resource demand or to move a virtual server from a failing physical node. Virtualization helps reduce complexity by reducing the number of physical hosts but it still involves purchasing servers and software and maintaining your infrastructure. Its greatest benefit is reducing the cost of that infrastructure for companies by maximizing the usage of the physical resources.

Cloud Computing: Measured Resources, Pay for What You Use

While virtualization may be used to provide cloud computing, cloud computing is quite different from virtualization. Cloud computing may look like virtualization because it appears that your application is running on a virtual server detached from any reliance or connection to a single physical host. And they are similar in that fashion. However, cloud computing can be better described as a service where virtualization is part of physical infrastructure.

Cloud computing grew out of the concept of utility computing. Essentially, utility computing was the belief that computing resources and hardware would become a commodity to the point that companies would purchase computing resources from a central pool and pay only for the number of CPU cycles, RAM, storage and bandwidth that they used. These resources would be metered to allow pay for what you use model much like you buy electricity from the electric company. This is how it became known as utility computing. It is common for cloud computing to be distributed across many servers. This provides redundancy, high availability and even geographic redundancy. This also makes cloud computing very flexible.

It is easy to add resources to your application. You just use them, just like you just use the electricity when you need it. Cloud computing has been designed with scalability in mind. The biggest drawback of cloud computing is that, of course, you do not control the servers. Your data is out there in the cloud and you have to trust the provider that it is safe. Many cloud computing services offer SLAs that promise to deliver a level of service and safety but it is critical to read the fine print. A failure of the cloud service could result in a loss of your data.

A practical comparison (Virtualization vs CLOUD COMPUTING)

VIRTUALIZATION

Virtualization is a technology that allows you to create multiple simulated environments or dedicated resources from a single, physical hardware system. Software called a hypervisor connects directly to that hardware and allows you to split 1 system into separate, distinct, and secure environments known as virtual machines (VMs). These VMs rely on the hypervisor’s ability to separate the machine’s resources from the hardware and distribute them appropriately.

CLOUD COMPUTING

Cloud computing is a set of principles and approaches to deliver compute, network, and storage infrastructure resources, services, platforms, and applications to users on-demand across any network. These infrastructure resources, services, and applications are sourced from clouds, which are pools of virtual resources orchestrated by management and automation software so they can be accessed by users on-demand through self-service portals supported by automatic scaling and dynamic resource allocation.