Question

Compare and contrast the two decisions of buying new servers and expanding the organization's organic IT infrastructure to the decision of contracting with a cloud service provider and migrating document storage to the cloud. Also, model the best option to support the organization's disaster recovery strategy for mission-critical document management and retention. You have also been asked to model the possibility of a third option using a private cloud developed by the organization versus paying for a public cloud environment.

Answer 1

Buying and setting up new servers ourselves can be very costly, this involves a lot of overhead in the organization and one important thing is that the organization cannot use the servers to their full potential but they would get the complete control over the servers and the data which they want to store in them.

But on the other hand if we hire or start a contract with a cloud service provider then there is very less risk involved in the process we need not have to think about the overhead involved in setting up the servers because cloud providers have them already set up, we just need to ask them based on our needs. The services provided by them are very flexible, in case if we initially in the starting want the less computing power or the storage then we can ask for the same and we will get according to our needs but in case of our own establishment we need to stay with the same compute power and storage for so long.

The services provided by the cloud providers are generally cheap because they are using the infrastructure made by them at the full potential and also there is huge competition in the market for the cloud service providers thus one can get the same infrastructure for cheap pricing with the flexibility in the infrastructure. And also the cloud provider generally maintains two or three copies of the data and all of them are generally stored at different locations so as to improve the reliability of the data and in case of any disaster the data can be retrieved from one out of all locations.

Thus one should go for the cloud-based services due to their potential and handling the data properly in case of disaster recovery and also due to the use of the infrastructure at the full capability.

In the case of public and private based cloud environment, it solely depends on the need of the organization if the data storage is very crucial and the users coming to the cloud are less then we can go for the private cloud but it would be very cost sensitive and there would be a need for replacing the servers and storage components after a few years and this overhead won't be present in the case of public based cloud environment.

Thanks