Global cloud infrastructure at your finger tips

Cloud Computing, a term being widely used and recently being adopted in our daily business communications, is no more than the practice of using a series of network of remote servers across the internet. These servers are specially hosted to store, manage and process data rather than using your local server or a personal computer. Cloud provides the customer’s data with features such as scalability, security, elasticity and redundancy. The term “Cloud computing” evolved in the late 2000’s based on its functionality and adaptation in computing resources.

Cloud computing can be broadly divided into three main categories:

• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

Many IT leaders are looking at the Cloud to provide them with the much needed agility for their business practices. Businesses should not have to have their attention on managing and continuously securing their data but rather having their attention on business innovation. Slowly run applications will tend to lower user productivity which of course would have an impact on revenue.

How applications run while on local premises is entirely different than how it may run in the Cloud. Keeping abreast with daily growing demands of any business – only one that is able to adapt easily and adjust will have long term success be it in the local or global market.

Firstly businesses should understand how the infrastructure is performing before they migrate to the Cloud and then test how they perform after this move. This is critical to understanding how to optimize and evaluate the impact on the end user. Another crucial component is to understand what parts of the infrastructure are causing the system to perform badly. In today’s world, IT departments are far more transparent and business users, more educated about IT. Companies now can easily source their IT from external providers in the Cloud, if they are not satisfied with the company’s internal IT department. This in turn creates a more service-driven culture that creates higher level of customer satisfaction due to competition and niche specific features.

Furthermore, today’s businesses are seldom localized and so global reach is critical for most service providers. Content and applications no longer remain native and need to be easily and readily available globally wherever the demand may come from.

The OnApp Federation is one such feature which allows a large amount of infrastructure to be used to extend your Cloud and CDN services, without having to build your very own global network. Cloud Federation, is going to be the next generation of CDN. This primarily means that customers can run dynamic websites on multiple locations/servers vs. only caching static pages and content. Customers would enjoy unlimited capacity in running their websites-whether that capacity is required seasonally or permanently. One of the best features is that the ownership of data will never be limited to one company and there are choices of different managed SLA’s to choose from. Data becomes an easy access to Cloud and CDN instances from around the world from a single dashboard-in actual time.

With 170+ locations in 113 cities across 43 countries, available on demand, you can create services that are as global and diverse, or as local and specified to individual want. Cloud Federation is a dynamic Cloud infrastructure under one umbrella: Mix cloud, dedicated servers, CDN, storage, disaster recovery and geared towards individual requirements.

The crux of this is really an online market that permits 900 of OnApp’s service provider customers to rent infrastructure from each other. This allows OnApp to offer a global reach to customers who need it without having to surrender control of their customers to providers in other geographical locations. The customer only gets a single view or face end of the service. For them, it appears that their service provider is global, leaving them just dealing with one point of contact and one bill to pay at the end of the day.

Cloud Federation helps customers engage and enter new global markets after mastering their own local market expertise. It helps in generating new revenue streams helping you to flexibly expand the business.

 

Benefits of Cloud Federation

• Dealing with a single company
• Unlimited capacity expansion
• No downtime

This is a very exciting time for Cloud hosting and it’s meticulous reconstructions are worth keeping an eye out for. Before you know it- your business model might get too old, too soon!