While there is frenzied activity on the cloud-computing front, businesses have a lot of decisions to make. If your business is considering investing in the cloud, which vendor should you choose? Which solution? Even before that comes the even bigger decision making parameter: Which type of cloud should you go for? Open Source such as OpenStack and Eucalyptus or one of the many proprietary cloud services?
The reason most businesses go for Open Source is pretty obvious: The license is free of charge and there’s a huge community that believes in the product. The open source community is one big, happy family.
The Open Source cloud, or any other open source project however, is not a completely free affair. The license for the software or application is indeed free but the technical know-how required to use and implement the software requires skilled labor, which doesn’t come cheap.
Further, you can’t expect to depend on the ‘open source community’ alone since no one person from within that community has any obligation to help you (although they might. In critical business scenarios, you couldn’t possibly wait for good Samaritans to show up, could you?
One smart way out of this predicament is to go for what’s known as “Partially closed Open Source Offering” – an offering that comes with the free Open Source Software or Application but also comes with vendor support and resources. Now, that’s an offer most proprietary vendors will have to put up a fight against to compete.
Decisions about what kind of cloud you should be using should primarily start from what part of your business you are going to apply the cloud to. Which function exactly? Why are you going to the cloud and How critical is going to the cloud for you? Depending on the answers to these questions, you’ll have a lot of analysis, number crunching, and decision-making to do.
You could always reach out to us for help. We’ll be happy to help you out with any strategic initiative you’d like to take for your business, as far as IT implementation, IT assets, and networking strategy is concerned.