“Are you asking me for money?’

Followed quickly by:

“Can you save me money?’

Of course the answer is:  It depends!  I would like to shout out “YOU’RE MISSING THE POINT” but that’s probably not helpful. Instead I decided to write this blog  “Saving Money with The Cloud”.

Most businesses I speak to face many pressures and the last thing on their mind is IT.  They are concerned about getting new business, managing staff, their premises costs, managing their current workload effectively… the list goes on.

So here are  FIVE reasons to think about your business and Cloud IT Solutions.

Continuity

Taking the most obvious reasons for spending on IT first, we need to talk about failure. What happens when it all goes wrong? You have data saved on your laptop or a local server and it breaks. Do you have a backup? Do you know how to access your backup? Will you be reliant on someone visiting your business to fix the problem? What will that cost?

We can level this up too… what happens when the company you rely on to supply your backup solution fails to deliver?  Do you want to wait until there is a disaster to find out if your solution is effective? Most companies seem to be happy to operate with this head in the sand approach. The truth is that backing up to Cloud is likely to be either a necessary extra expense (if you have no valuable backup solution today) or a cost saving (if your current backup solution is anywhere other than in The Cloud). So the answer here is  “Yes I can save you money.”

Growth

If you need to expand for any reason you should think Cloud. If you take on staff how will you communicate and share data? Do you need more space for more data?  The Cloud might be the cheapest option and will remove your need to spend cash on new hardware.

Money Management

Maybe this should be the number 1 reason to move to Cloud? With Cloud Services you pay for what you use. Its easy to budget. There are no unexpected bills. Any Cloud support costs should be 100% transparent with no surprises.

Security

The next thing we need to discuss is “Security”.  IT Security is such a massive topic, whole books are written about it and anything I write here could only gloss over one of the most important IT topics.   Suffice it to say that lots of small companies imagine that this is not an issue for them. Until you ask them what their competitors could do with their customer list… or what they could do with their competitors list of contacts. Security IS an issue for EVERYONE.

Some imagine that the least secure place for their data is on the cloud but I suggest you look at it this way: If I were to post your data where everyone can see it, such as on a billboard, what would we need to do with that data to keep it secure. Then answer is to encrypt it. Secrecy has come a long way since you were a child. We don’t just swap the letters around or write it in lemon juice. Very complex encryption techniques are available to all of us. By utilizing this technology we can choose precisely who should see what data whilst making it available easily.

We don’t just swap the letters around
or write it in lemon juice.

Improving your business

For some companies there is a clear benefit in improving their IT. Yes you can save money by introducing efficiency to your business. Good IT choices can drive better business decisions.  Even very small businesses should be tech-aware. Whether its digital marketing, a better website or sharing data with customers YOU can improve your business by making good IT choices.

For larger customers, adopting Cloud best practices can make you reach your market faster, change quicker and allow you to become more agile. Business growth is often driven by disrupting the status quo. Will you be disrupting or disrupted?

To explain this in more detail lets look at the different ways we can build a server in AWS. AWS servers are called “EC2 instances” (ECC stands for Elastic Compute Cloud). Once you have an account you can use your browser to visit a console where you can click on a button to build your server. The form will ask you a bunch of questions and then Amazon will build the virtual server for you.

However Amazon also allow you to build your server from the command line. You can download the AWS SDK or you can use the CLI.  These tools will allow us to write code that can be executed to build whatever we need. There are other tools (such as Ansible and Terraform) that can add a level of abstraction and simplification to this process.

Once all of your infrastructure is built as code things start to change in the way the infrastructure is managed. We can start to introduce all the good practices that developers have been using for years to manage code. Simple things such as versioning, keeping backups of previous versions, extensive in-line commenting to name but a few.

Our code can tell our Cloud Service Provider (CSP) what to build but also tell us what we have built removing the need to continually update a database  that references our complex environments. Infrastructure change becomes easier to manage as we can roll back to a previous version in minutes.

But our code can do even more than this. Our code can include references that allow automatic scaling of services. However that demands an understanding of the subject of elasticity and at this point its probably worth reviewing the 10 principles of a good Cloud strategy.

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So it is with Cloud Computing. If we think of Cloud as simply a bunch of servers off site then we are missing 95% of the benefits. we could just lift and shift our existing server estate and provision it from a Cloud Service Provider but that is unimaginative and prosaic.

The right approach is “embrace” Cloud. This will necessitate a complete change of mind set within your current IT world!

One reason for this is that Cloud Services are charged for by the minute or by the hour (depending on some basic choices) and therefore you should only build EXACTLY what you need to consume. Most servers only operate at a small fraction of their capacity for most of a day. Traditional server estates are designed to be much larger than needed to be able to cope with spikes in demand. Cloud Servers should be stopped when they are not being used and therefore you wont need to pay for them.  It wouldn’t make sense to have someone on standby to start and stop machines when needed either. So therefore all Cloud Services SHOULD be consumed programmatically!

Once we have taken that important leap in understanding we are well on the way to EMBRACING rather than USING Cloud. In my next post I will get to IaC to describe why this is such a BIG THING.

So to start at the beginning: What Is Cloud?

Using the term Cloud to refer to computing services really took off in 2006 as Amazon started to sell access to the computing power that they used to manage the Amazon.com market-place. Google followed suit two years later with Google App Engine. It essentially refers to the practice of providing computer resources that  are consumed over the internet. Commonly these resources are Compute and Storage resources but can  (and will) be expanded to cover almost all IT Technical Services.

A good analogy is electricity. Very few companies today would find it necessary to to generate their own electricity. Rather it is a service that they consume. It is cheaper and easier to let experts handle power generation and deliver it to your door, to be consumed by your company, paid for in units as you use them.

There are some important definitions that we will cover later that will explain some of the differences between different flavours and styles of Cloud Computing such as SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. Also we will cover Hybrid Cloud Public Cloud and Private Cloud to see if we can understand which of these will be most beneficial for you.

Next See “Using Cloud or Embracing Cloud” as this will help you understand some of the reasons why you should ensure that you and your company are properly engaged with the Cloud world.

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