Jmskef is the leading provider of cloud computing outsourcing services. With tremendous growth in demand for IT services, IT organizations have started focusing on core competencies and are looking at simplifying operations while managing expenditures. With infrastructure being increasingly made available as a service, IT service provider companies will no longer develop applications for supporting processes; these will be made readily accessible in the cloud

What is Cloud Computing Services?

Cloud is a crucial next generation resource amongst the series of useful resources available to an IT organization. A cloud virtualizes IT infrastructure –a network of servers usually- in the form of a datacenter belonging to the outsourcing provider. The outsourcing provider creates a shared pool of resources available to multiple buyers. These resources are used simultaneously by multiple users as per their needs to bring down costs. It also reduces dependency on administrators through complete automation and increases reliability. Cloud provides flexibility of use and scale as the business grows with low requirements for maintenance.

With the increase in on-demand services, demand for private cloud hosting and consulting is rising in the enterprise solutions market. Service providers specializing in private cloud offerings are expected to dominate the industry in the coming years as they offer the benefit of owning important data within the organization. However, this comes at the cost of scale and marginal increase in costs.

Cloud Computing Services Models

Cloud Computing Services is offered as different models- IaaS, SaaS and PaaS

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): This model provides immense flexibility and control over physical server maintenance, network and storage space for data and similar IT resources.

Software as a Service (SaaS): This model is complete package- the service provider runs and manages services end to end. This includes maintenance, management of infrastructural facilities and all other support services.

Platform as a Service (PaaS): This model presents ready-to-use platforms to users by offering a scalable platform on a pre-built environment. This saves huge investments in set up, eliminates need for managing associated infrastructure (usually hardware, OS) and increases the efficiency of operations and speed to market.

Models for Cloud Computing Services Deployment

• Public Cloud: This mode deploys cloud-based applications built on the cloud. This provides architecture, relief from managing applications and facilitates scaling up of core infrastructure.  It supports pay as you use model where organizations can scale up gradually without huge investments on capital infrastructure. Hence, this is suited to organizations having fluctuations in their computing requirements.
• On-premises (Private): This is different than a public cloud which supports multiple tenants. Here a cloud is isolated especially for the buyer for high performance or security issues. Despite on-premise deployment not providing all the benefits of cloud computing, organizations still prefer this mode as it provides dedicated resources ensuring data internalization and security.
• Hybrid: This represents a mix of both- cloud resources and existing resources not located in the cloud. It equips an organization’s infrastructure with access to cloud while connecting cloud based resources to internal system.

Cloud Computing Services v/s Traditional Outsourcing

Cloud Computing is increasingly taking on traditional outsourcing offering more benefits. Cloud Computing automates business processes unlike traditional outsourcing where processes are outsourced to another vendor.

In traditional outsourcing, providers replace your on-premise system with off shelf products in their datacenter. Multi-year contracts, time based costs, teams and on site integrators characterize traditional outsourcing solutions. At times, traditional outsourcing providers may themselves be using cloud solutions.

Benefits of Cloud Computing Services

With Cloud computing, IT organizations reap the following benefits:

• No frills contract – Cloud offers relatively flexible short term contracts
• No huge investments- Volume based pricing and No fixed licensing costs support growing organizations with fluctuation in demand for computing
• Ease of set up and low maintenance
• Completely eliminate onsite work/ Code

With cloud, the risk of underutilized resources is also shared. The cloud vendors are motivated to develop new features to attract more users, which can prove useful to IT organizations.

Despite such benefits, as Cloud is a new concept compared with outsourcing, companies will take some time to embrace this solution. Multi sourcing is the buzzword- a mix of both the worlds. Gradually, cloud computing will munch on to the entire IT budgets as organizations scale up and start reaping full benefits from the cloud solutions.

Strategy for adopting Cloud Computing

Adopting Cloud is easy. However, the implementation and use of Cloud needs to be thought through strategically. Companies should draw a “Cloud Adoption Strategy” to decide what they need and what can cloud help them perform and achieve. What facilities and resources are required or not should also be qualified. Some key factors to focus on while choosing cloud are:

• Cost: A comparison between current costs of existing IT Infrastructure and Cloud computing pricing should be done. The costs should be determined accurately with proper considerations of storage, backup, processing licenses, network resources and support requirements.
• Flexibility: Scalability and term of contracts should be taken into consideration before closing on a cloud requirement.
• Security: Security Compliance of your organization needs to be in line with cloud adoption
• Provider: The vendor and its long term vision plays a crucial role in determining the support which can be expected with changing landscape of your own business.

At Jmskef, we are a team of talented and trained members who provide end to end consulting on cloud computing deployment. We help our partners focus on their core operations and make their business efficient and profitable.