I’m back with another post about why it is beneficial to switch over to the cloud for the majority of users out there. This article will focus on the benefits of virtualizing your infrastructure, I’m not talking about just virtualizing your servers, I’m talking about virtualizing your infrastructure – switches, load balancers, firewalls, NAS, database servers, etc. Virtual Private Data Center (VPD or VPDC) is the correct term when you are referring to virtualizing your data center infrastructure or others would also refer to this type of cloud as infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

Run Multiple Environments: Cloud computing allows you to virtualize almost anything from your data center infrastructure by using commodity servers. This presents a lot of benefits for everybody, from the end users all the way to the CEO of the company. Cloud computing allows organizations to run multiple environments without the need to purchase all the hardware – you can run multiple sandbox environments as well as a production environment without the huge upfront setup costs (just the cloud computing monthly service fee). This presents a huge financial benefit since organizations have the ability to run each environment with extreme flexibility and without investing in heavily-depreciating hardware.

Lower Time-to-Market: Since each environment is set up as a cloud computing service, you can afford to give each network administrator and network engineer their own environment to test out their plans (maybe not the ones you don’t favour). Once they’re done configuring their own setup on the cloud, run your tests and determine which is the most robust and efficient setup. After that, you scrap the test environments, maybe fire one or two people that failed at this task, then you migrate your production environment onto the new cloud computing setup. Don’t waste time setting up hardware setups and changing them around because with a few clicks, cloud computing takes care of all of the troubles for you. It sounds lazy, and that’s because it is, but at the same time it’s very efficient and gives you the utmost flexibility with your infrastructure. With the AppLogic cloud computing platform, you can even save all the different setups as templates and provision them as you need them – remain two steps ahead of the competition and one step behind your diet I always say. This can also be accomplished with other cloud computing platforms but I used AppLogic as a sample.

Upgrade Your Infrastructure: With cloud computing’s virtual appliances, an organization never needs to stay with a legacy setup because of hardware incompatibility: Plan and provision a new setup, test it then make it your production environment and toss out the old one! Why not? It’s not going to be on your balance sheet depreciating like traditional infrastructure, and it’s going to improve your overall performance. Satisfied users, evolving infrastructure and no depreciating hardware … why not move to an AppLogic cloud? If you don’t like saving money, time and labour then I guess you can stick to traditional infrastructure hosting. The only person coming happy out of that outcome is your debt issuers.

I hope this article was informative for you and not confusing. Overall, it’s better to have your infrastructure as a service since new technology and new software is constantly coming out. Hardware would need to be upgraded and sometimes replaced, but you can avoid that hassle and save yourself a lot of time and money while improving your performance with a virtual private data center or infrastructure as a service cloud computing.

As always, feel free to contact me at yazan [at] rightservers [dot] com with any topics you wish to know more about.

Thank you for your time and I hope you come back soon!

Kind regards,

CEO – RIGHTSERVERS.COM