Instalec Cloud solutions

Doing more with less
It seems right now that everyone is talking about the cloud. The appeal is clear. The promise of lower costs, higher resilience and greater flexibility addresses the core challenges many enterprises face today.

But what do we really mean by cloud? Is it really the answer to every company’s issues? And where does the hype end and real business benefit begin? Today, the cloud comes in a number of flavours. Broadly, we can divide these into private, public and hybrid cloud. Each has particular strengths and each will be more appropriate for certain tasks.

Private cloud
A private cloud is, as its name suggests, private to an individual company. It is the first step in treating IT as a service allowing you to provide any application to end users from your own internet-connected datacentre.  With a private cloud, you can use resources dedicated to your organisation (whether on- or off-premises). It means you get many of the benefits of public cloud computing – such as resources pooling, self-service, scalability and elasticity – with the additional control and customisation available from being able to directly manage your own equipment and infrastructure.

And, because by its nature a private cloud separates resources from physical infrastructure, you get improved agility, increased business alignment, and cost-effectiveness exceeding even that of a virtualised infrastructure.

Public cloud
Public clouds are closely associated with the software as a service (SaaS) and pay as you go models. However, this is just the start. With an advanced public cloud – such as Microsoft Azure – you can run virtually any application, anywhere and access it from everywhere.

Because everything is hosted in robust, secure third-party datacentres, you get the flexibility to buy as much or as little of the service as you need. More than this, you can change the services you buy as and when your business demands it. And you can be sure the services will be available to whoever needs them, precisely when they need them.

The result is a low-cost, pay-per-use solution that’s easy to manage and incredibly flexible.

Hybrid cloud
Today, for most companies, the best cloud solution is neither 100% private nor 100% public. Instead, it’s a mix – what’s called a hybrid cloud.

In this arrangement, some data and applications are held privately while others live on secure public cloud services. So, you may choose to hold sensitive customer data within a private cloud while using the public cloud to host all your productivity applications. It means you can make full use of your current infrastructure while also being able to scale rapidly as and when you need to – all while keeping costs low.

And with the latest management systems we offer, you can have complete, intuitive control no matter what mix of services you choose.

The beauty of the cloud is that you can select exactly what’s right for your business. You can scale up and down as your needs demand. And you can do it all with an unprecedented level of control.