Cloud Types and Their Benefits
A Public cloud can be defined as computing services offered by third-party providers over the Internet—as opposed to private cloud environments managed solely by an individual organization for their exclusive use. The combination of public cloud computing resources with on-premises computing assets and associated private clouds is referred to as a hybrid cloud environment.
Public cloud providers make these services available to anyone who wants to use or purchase them. Cloud services may be free or sold on-demand, allowing customers to pay only per-usage for the CPU cycles, storage, or bandwidth they consume. They are broadly categorized as software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and/or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). Customers may opt to supplement or replace traditional on-premises components with equivalent “as a service” offerings.
The advantages of on-demand, subscription-based offerings include:
Derive Technologies maintains strategic partnerships with leading public cloud service providers including Microsoft, AWS, and Citrix. Our professional services team has the experience and expertise to help organizations to develop and realize an appropriate hybrid-cloud strategy.
Click on the Common Challenges or Derive Cloud Solutions info tabs below to learn more. Or to schedule a complimentary consultation on cloud issues affecting your organization, please click the Schedule Consultation button above or fill out the contact form at the bottom of this page.
Common Challenges
Public cloud offerings can be employed as part of an overall technology strategy to address common business and technical challenges like the following scenarios;
Scenario 1: Rapid deployment of temporary or supplemental infrastructure in a public cloud. An organization may acquire temporary additional capacity for applications or services from a public cloud provider, driven, perhaps, by a one-time or seasonal uptick in compute or storage requirements. During the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, many Derive customers required temporary supplemental compute and storage capacity in support of unanticipated telecommuting needs. Healthcare customers also experienced sudden and sustained spikes in capacity requirements. In these cases, on-demand provisioning of PaaS and IaaS solutions proved invaluable.
Scenario 2: Reduction of on-premises infrastructure footprint in support of downsizing. Considering the shift to a largely remote workforce during the Covid-19 pandemic, many organizations considered reducing their commercial real estate expenditures via office downsizing or office closures.
In these situations, the ability to move most or all workloads from traditional, on-premises hypervisor platforms to public cloud compute nodes (IaaS) was an excellent option for reducing or eliminating a company’s on-premises infrastructure footprint. Most organizations’ anticipated return-to-office (RTO) strategy involves some sort of hybrid approach, where traditional assigned desks and cubicles are replaced with “hoteling cubicles” and shared meeting spaces. Cloud computing solutions like Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Azure IaaS are ideal for a hybrid workplace environment where only a small subset of an organization’s employees work in the office at any given time.
Scenario 3: Implementation of a “cloud first” IT strategy. Many organizations, especially small and mid-sized businesses, are considering a cloud-first IT strategy whereby all applications and services are delivered via public cloud offerings (e.g., everything-as-a-service). A cloud-first strategy affords organizations a high degree of agility and flexibility to adapt to rapidly evolving business needs. It also can maximize public cloud benefits such as rapid provisioning, elasticity, high availability, and fault tolerance, while also providing organizations with a predictable, metered, OPEX-centric model for expenditures.
Derive Cloud Solutions
Derive offers numerous “as a service” solutions leveraging public cloud offerings from various providers. Derive is a Microsoft Gold Partner with competencies in Cloud Platform (Microsoft Azure) and Cloud Productivity (Microsoft 365 Application suite). We are an AWS Select-tier partner, Citrix Platinum solution advisor, and Nutanix XYZ partners. Derive offers numerous cloud-based and cloud-managed solutions, including, but not limited to:
Cloud-based Application Delivery and Desktop Virtualization
Derive has successfully deployed Citrix Cloud IaaS offerings to numerous customers, providing both Microsoft RDS (“XenApp”) application delivery and Windows 10 VDI-as-a-service solutions. Citrix Cloud VDI provides unparalleled flexibility, cloud-based management with rapid provisioning, and on-demand capacity scaling with either AWS or Azure providing compute and connectivity services.
Cloud-based Messaging, Collaboration, and Desktop Productivity
Derive has a large install base of Microsoft 365 customers that enjoy the numerous benefits of the Office 365 SaaS product suite, including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Microsoft Teams. We also supplement core MS 365 SaaS offering with various identity, security, monitoring, and data protection enhancements such as Multi-factor Authentication (MFA), Azure Information Protection, Azure AD Connect Health Monitoring, and Microsoft 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP).
Cloud IaaS On-demand Compute Services
Microsoft has used Azure Migrate and various third-party tools to migrate server virtualizations workloads to Microsoft Azure. Azure compute nodes and storage accounts are used in various capacities depending on customer needs. Common use-cases include redundant instances for on-premises servers, data protection using Azure Backup, and business continuity using Azure Site Recovery Services.
Cloud-based DNS and URL content filtering
Derive has successfully deployed Cisco Umbrella as a comprehensive, identity-based web-content filtering solution. Cisco Umbrella versatile and extensible, with plug-ins for AnyConnect remote access clients, as well as for Cisco Firepower and Cisco Meraki UTM security appliance. Cisco Umbrella provides malware protection and hygiene services as well as a means of enforcing an organization’s acceptable usage policy (AUP).
Case Studies
The link below accesses a PowerPoint presentation on the process and considerations involved in transferring VM workloads from on-premises to the cloud; in this case, Microsoft Azure.
