cloud technology

Virtual Private Cloud – A Feasible Substitute To On-Premises Computing

Bobby Varghese

Virtual Private Cloud – A Feasible Substitute to On-Premises Computing:

Public Cloud has been gaining popularity and has become the most favorable deployment model for most organizations because of its cost efficiency and flexibility. It allows a huge number of users to share the computing resources provided by their service provider and pay only for the resources they actually use. Enterprises understand these benefits but many still prefer a private environment for their workloads because of security and privacy issues and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) helps meet that demand.

VPC is a similar idea where the enterprises use a private cloud that is a small part of the public cloud instead of owning a cloud infrastructure themselves.

The reasons behind enterprises choosing VPCs are usually the complexities in building an on-premises private cloud from scratch. A private cloud may shoot up the costs due to increased management responsibilities and smaller economies of scale. Some enterprises may not even have the infrastructure required to completely build and manage a custom private cloud within their own IT department. According to Lauren E. Nelson, a principal analyst and private infrastructure-as-a-service cloud lead at Forrester Research, 82% of enterprises with 1,000 or more employees don’t have the employee strength to build a private cloud server.

In some cases, it is because many enterprises that think are operating a private cloud are actually just running a standard virtualized environment.

 

Before an enterprise chooses to deploy a VPC, it should first understand how it differs from the on-premises private cloud and the benefits and trade-offs it brings with it.

  1. Server Setup: A virtual private cloud has a lesser number of users who have higher control over their sections of the cloud server whereas, a private cloud distributes resources across multiple physical servers.
  2. Location: Generally, a VPC is hosted at an off-site which is usually hosted by a third party service provider. On the other hand, an on-premises private cloud is situated at your own data center.
  3. Cost: A Virtual Private Cloud is vastly inexpensive and cheaper as compared to the On-Premises Private Cloud. This is basically because of the costs incurred on hardware, installation, set-up and maintenance.

 

Essential benefits of Virtual Private Clouds:

  1. Security: The data storage, network, and hardware can be designed according to the security needs of your business and cannot be accessed by clients or companies in the same building or data center.
  2. Compliance: Since the network and storage configuration is based around your business, it is easier to monitor the security and compliance needs of your business.
  3. Customization: You can completely customize the network, storage and hardware performance according to the needs of your business. You can add CPUs, RAM, and Storage as and when required.
  4. Cost Effectiveness: The amount of money spent on Virtual Private Cloud depends on the resources required by your business. You’ll know how much each resource costs and how much you have to pay for any additional storage, hardware or network components you require.

 

With the many benefits of Virtual Private Clouds, enterprises these days have started taking a path towards Hybrid Cloud and are implementing VPCs to combine cloud and on-premises computing. This way, they can make use of shared resources by keeping their workloads private and secure.

Are you also looking at implementing Virtual Private Cloud for your enterprise? Sysfore can build you a single dedicated private environment that is fast and flexible enough to run everything from your CRM systems to your ERP solutions. Write to us at info@sysfore.com or get in touch with us at +91 (80) 4110 5555.

Top 5 Ways Financial Services Are Leveraging Cloud Technology

Bobby Varghese

The cloud isn’t quite popular in the financial sector, as it is in other industries. The financial sector deals with highly sensitive and valuable data and because of certain misconceptions about the cloud being unsecure in nature, IT leaders have been very skeptical in adopting cloud technology. But, things are changing and the financial industry is beginning to realize the improvements in operations offered by the cloud. Thus, many IT decision makers in the industry have started to “make the move”. But, there’s one simple question that pops-up when it comes to adopting the cloud – What are banks and insurance companies using the cloud for?

 

In this article, we have discussed the top 5 ways financial sector can leverage cloud:

Back-office systems: Hosting back-office systems in the cloud eliminates the need to deal with hardware procurement and maintenance, power and cooling, and staff utilization for regular maintenance activities. Although back-office systems are critical for any financial organization, it is an easy way to test the working of the cloud without feeling like a customer-facing system being put to risk. HR / Payroll / Time Tracking Applications, CRM, Office 365 and Digital workloads (website, email, etc.) are some of the most common applications being moved to the cloud.

 

Customer-facing applications: With the constant rise in customer portals and mobile applications, banks and insurance companies have been migrating their customer-facing applications to the cloud. Using the cloud reduces the need to worry about scalability and agility as compared to using the in-house management which is expensive and faces challenges in accommodating traffic fluctuations.

 

Policy-management systems: The insurance companies have started accepting cloud as the practical solution to host their insurance policy management systems. These hold critical customer information like policies, new claims, background checks, etc. And, since the supporting infrastructure needs to be compliant to store such information, HIPAA and PCI-compliant clouds are an ideal choice for insurance organizations.

 

Uptime and Disaster Recovery (DR): The use of customer portals and mobile applications also demand the banks and other financial organizations to be online and in service 24×7. The legacy disaster recovery solutions are not only slow and expensive but also hardware intensive for modern day financial institutions. By adopting cloud DR solutions, financial institutions can follow compliance requirements and reduce downtime at a fraction of the cost of their legacy DR solutions.

 

Business Intelligence and Analytics: Digitalization of banking processes has led to the generation of massive amounts of customer data. Companies know that this data can be mined to get meaningful insights in real-time and has to be stored somewhere. The cloud enables data storage in HIPAA and PCI-compliant manner and ensures that the sensitive information collected by banks and insurance companies is absolutely secure and available. Cloud is also scalable and eliminates the problem of quickly changing resource requirements for business analytics.

 

Identifying the right application, specific to the finance industry, can put a whole lot of obligations on the internal teams of an organization. Thus, working with a reputed service provider is a worthwhile solution.

 

At Sysfore, we have worked with thousands of enterprises of all sizes helping them identify business breakthroughs that the Cloud can enable. We examine your business requirements holistically and help you migrate to Cloud to increase business effectiveness.

If you have questions about how you can leverage the cloud for your organization, get in touch with our experts by writing to us at info@sysfore.com or call us at +91-80-41105555.

6 Steps To Build A Scalable Cloud Infrastructure

Bobby Varghese

Shifting an IT infrastructure to cloud is not a question of if but when. The current trend shows a continuous decline in the use of on-premises infrastructure or internal private cloud. According to Gartner, “an average organization expects to triple its allocated share of capacity to public cloud services across the next two or three years”.

Many senior business leaders believe that cloud offers the scale and flexibility needed to support the operating model transformation at the speeds unmatched by internal IT organizations. It helps to speed up new product development by innovating, delivering digital services to customers.

 

In this article, we’ll discuss the six steps which every IT team must follow to build a scalable cloud infrastructure:

1. Determine the role of cloud in your enterprise’s digital strategy: Today, every organization needs to be efficient in terms of agility, scalability, and cost optimization. While developing the cloud strategy for your organization, start by examining how cloud can enable your business activities instead of starting with a perspective of corporate IT.

2. Determine the priorities and trade-offs: Before you collaborate with a business partner, determine the priorities and trade-offs between speed, cost and risk. Educating your business partners about the cloud and its required trade-offs is an important part of developing a wider digital understanding of the enterprise.

3. Begin with simple projects and build up on them: Today, digital priorities of organizations are changing so rapidly that every strategy needs to be flexible in order to meet the changes in demand. Adopt a test-and-learn approach by beginning with projects that are less complex in nature and building iteratively to high-value efforts. Read more →