Despite cloud adoption becoming more prevalent than ever, debate surrounding on-premises vs cloud is still hotly contested. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, depending on where your business priorities lie. However, a hybrid cloud solution provides a third way. And our partnership with Microsoft means you can be confident that all your cloud needs are met without losing any of your on-premises benefits. We explore hybrid cloud in more detail on our Your Infrastructure. Your Way homepage, but first let’s run through five common areas of discussion to illustrate what a Dell Technologies and Microsoft hybrid cloud solution can bring to your organisation.
Deployment
On premises: With all resources deployed in-house and within an enterprise’s IT infrastructure, you’re responsible for maintaining the solution and all its related processes. This isn’t very cost-effective and devours staff resources to maintain your infrastructure.
Cloud: Resources are hosted on the premises of the service provider, but you can access those resources and use as much as you want. However, if a power failure or server crash occurs, you could lose access and potentially lose your data as well. Alongside this, various firewall settings or security policies could cause connectivity issues with your internal networks. You may also find that managing logins for multiple developers or team members becomes more complicated.
Hybrid cloud: With the strength of two enterprise portfolios, we’ll help you optimise your IT transformation and data centre modernisation with purpose-built hardware and software solutions whilst eliminating the need to manage multiple vendor contracts and associated logins. Plus, our industry-leading platform management tools integrate with Windows System Centre and Windows Admin Centre, giving you a single management console for your PowerEdge and Microsoft environment.
Cost
On premises: You’re responsible for the ongoing costs of the server hardware, power consumption and space. It also requires rack space or a designated room on site, along with dedicated IT support. Data needs to be backed up, functionality must be guaranteed and applications updated. Employee time is consumed by these efforts.
Cloud: You pay only for the resources you use, with none of the maintenance and upkeep costs. Pricing scales are based on consumption. However, many cloud solutions only provide basic functionality with limited customisation options. Plus, you may be limited by the amount of resources you can consume.
Hybrid cloud: Our Dell Technologies Consulting Services help you realise the agility and cost benefits of Dell Technologies cloud platforms before deployment. From defining service blueprints to migrating applications and delivering efficient, automated cloud operations, our consultants are on hand to customise your cloud transformation to your needs. We help you optimise for cost, performance and scale, with a data-first approach to hybrid cloud that ensures you’re only paying for what you need.
Control
On premises: You retain all your data and are fully in control of what happens to it. This can be good or bad, depending on the situation. If you’re in a highly regulated industry with extra privacy concerns, you may hesitate to fly blind into the cloud because of this.
Cloud: Ownership of data remains contentious for many companies and vendors. Data and encryption keys reside within your third-party provider. So if the unexpected happens and there is downtime, you may be unable to access that data.
Hybrid cloud: With Dell Technologies and Microsoft hybrid cloud solutions you can simplify your cloud experiences everywhere — wherever your applications and data reside — whilst increasing your IT agility and control. You can move applications among clouds and connect data with ease and avoid vendor lock-in. With Dell PowerScale, you can procure software as a virtual appliance for file services in public cloud marketplaces. This means you use the same, familiar management tools so no additional training is required. In addition, hybrid cloud capabilities allow you to easily scale on-premises resources by quickly spinning up equivalent services in a public cloud.
Security
On premises: If you have extra sensitive information — government and banking industries for example — you need the level of security and privacy that on premises provides. Despite promises, cloud security remains the primary concern for many. This allows on premises, despite its many drawbacks and price tag, to still make more sense to many.
Cloud: Security issues in cloud computing continue to be a major concern for businesses. From data loss to insecure APIs, user account hijacking, DDoS attacks and even risks associated with changing service providers, issues remain.
Hybrid cloud: Dell Technologies provides access to its data protection offerings for public clouds with Dell PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for Microsoft Azure. This functions alongside a broad portfolio of security offerings available through Microsoft Azure Marketplace that provide unparalleled hybrid cloud security. You can deploy isolated cyber vaults in the public cloud to more securely protect and isolate data away from a ransomware attack, improving cyber resiliency and helping reduce the impact of cyberattacks. There are also several flexible recovery options in the event of a cyberattack, including recovery within the data centre via an Azure private network or in an unimpacted Azure environment.
Compliance
On premises: Regulatory control exists, regardless of industry: U.K. Data Protection Act, Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, PCI-DSS and even the California Consumer Privacy Act. Being subject to such regulations means remaining compliant and always knowing where your data
Cloud: If you choose a cloud computing model, you must do your due diligence and ensure that your third-party provider is up to scratch and compliant with all relevant regulatory mandates. Sensitive data must be secured; and customers, partners, and employees must have protection and peace of mind.
Hybrid cloud: Dell Technologies has always worked in collaboration with partners to build solutions that offer complete risk and compliance solutions. Our solutions are multi-tenant, service provider–focused, and ready today to accelerate risk and compliance management for your business. We cover all regulatory compliance requirements, such as GDPR, PCI, HIPAA, ISO, NIST, FFIEC, FISMA and FedRAMP. So you can rest easy.
To find out more about how hybrid cloud solution can help your business to evolve, visit the Your Infrastructure. Your Way homepage and gain access to related resources or register for our upcoming in-person events.
