Choosing the Right Enterprise Cloud Solution for Your Organization

Cloud computing is here to stay and many organizations are under pressure to move towards this powerful new technology. Yet, concerns around moving into the cloud are very real. Complex and time consuming deployment, security risks, nightmarish application migration scenarios and buggy and immature private cloud management offerings are just some of the barriers to mainstream enterprise adoption of the cloud.

Enterprises want the same benefits of agility, automation and scale demonstrated by public cloud services such as Amazon EC2 behind their firewall. Although the number of private and hybrid cloud solutions is increasing rapidly, discerning which solution is best suited to your organization can be difficult, Here we attempt to provide some pointers for choosing the right enterprise cloud management solution for your organization – one that is reliable, will meet your business needs and allow you to focus on innovation.

What is an Enterprise Cloud Solution?

An Enterprise Cloud Solution promises to convert your static data center into nimble compute capacity that is further enhanced by seamless integration with other on- and off-premise clouds. Essentially, the Enterprise Cloud Solution offers a cost-effective way to meet your organization's computing requirements by optimizing the utilization of your current infrastructure and increasing all-round system efficiency by automating resource provisioning and reducing the need for human interaction.

The key benefits of an Enterprise Cloud Solution, offering access to both on- and off-premises compute capacity, include:

• Flexible compute capacity promotes innovation and allows organizations to rapidly respond to changing business demands while focusing on their core-competencies.
• Infrastructure cost savings - Corporate servers are estimated to run below 15% capacity. An Enterprise Cloud Solution promises to dramatically increase infrastructure utilization rates especially where load is variable, eliminating the need for hardware purchases that tackle only peak demand and avoiding over-provisioning of resources.
• Operational cost savings - By automating manual processes, Enterprise Cloud Solutions reduce the demand for administration and support.

Why not just use Public Cloud Services?


An Enterprise Cloud Solution offers the benefits of flexible, responsive compute capacity both behind the firewall and in the public cloud domain. A good Enterprise Cloud Solution should provide access to both local private infrastructure and off-premise cloud services with a uniform interface and integrated authentication. Although public cloud services provide unique opportunities for certain types of compute, particularly those with unpredictable load, there are many advantages to deploying an in-house private cloud able to link to external clouds when necessary. Customers should not have to choose one over the other but be able to implement a flexible solution that allows them to utilize both as required.

The benefits of having access to local on-premise cloud capacity as opposed to solely accessing public cloud services for elastic compute needs include: