From big NGOs to back-office charities, nonprofits are following enterprises and individuals into the cloud. But even as we accustom ourselves to the welter of new initials that seem to come off any new technology like sparks off a flywheel - IaaS, anyone? - there’s a new issue to deal with.
What kind of cloud?
Googling Public Cloud and Private Cloud will show you the strengths and shortcomings of both, but let’s just look over the two options briefly.
Public Cloud gives you easy accessibility, lots of storage and low cost. It’s all hosted in someone else’s servers and you pay to use it, not own it, which means low upfront costs. The downside is your applications, virtual servers, and data sit side-by-side with others’ and security in public clouds is an issue. No less than the for-profit sector we have to abide by privacy regulations and respect the data we have on people who use our services or support us, so public cloud feels risky.
Private cloud gives you the accessibility of cloud and the privacy of onsite IT. That’s because it’s a way of running cloud through your onsite IT. It’s a cloud solution that runs from your servers. You can control the whole cloud, not just your little part of it. You have control over its structure, and security is far less of a concern. But you also have to arrange every upgrade, every storage capacity increase, yourself. So its advantages from the IT department’s perspective can seem overstated.
Hybrid Cloud offers a combination of these two approaches that delivers the best of both with the drawbacks of neither. A hybrid cloud solution offers the scalability, accessibility and low costs of public cloud with the controllability and data security of private cloud.
How does it work?
Hybrid Cloud consists of a public cloud, like Amazon Web Services or Joyen Compute, and a private cloud operated either in-house or by a third party hosting company. The private element is behind a firewall, and in the case of hosting companies it’s usually behind several, multiply redundant firewalls. While it’s two separate pieces under the hood, it feels like just one when you use it because the two elements communicate with each other over an encrypted channel, meaning access to the private part of the cloud or to sensitive data can be controlled centrally.
Hybrid cloud isn’t just a question of plugging your servers into a public cloud. Rather, it’s an IT solution that’s based on seamless communication with a genuinely cloud-based private system and a wider public cloud for nonsensitive data, communications and productivity.
How should it be implemented?
Hybrid Cloud is usually either constructed inhouse or offered as a service by a hosting provider. Unless you have a really great IT department and the size to make it worthwhile, it makes sense to run with a provider like Rackspace, Eucalyptus, VMWare or IBM.
What are the benefits to the nonprofit?
Hybrid Cloud offers nonprofits the advantage that you can accommodate the increasing demands on IT both from staff and users, while guaranteeing data is secure and offering an unparallelled level of availability and security.
Need a cloud provider for your organization? Call Stratosphere Networks today at 877-599-3999 to speak with one of our IT professionals.
