Virtualization has become the best new way to do business as IT members and administrators come to grips with the fact that the performance of a machine, a system, or company is no longer tied to the physical. The natural progression of virtualization is to first move out of the office and then into the world of cloud hosting, transitioning from things such as virtual private servers to cloud hosting and cloud VPS options, which are similar in many respects to those offered by virtualization.
Before moving to a fully cloud hosting solution for all of their email, software, and website hosting needs, a company should have a basic understanding of the ways in which cloud hosting can be implemented. The three most common types of cloud services currently on the market are infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and software as a service. From a purchaser perspective, these will look similar, but they are operated differently on the provider end of the equation. An IAAS, for example Amazon’s EC2 elastic computing cloud, will allow for multiple virtual private servers all with clear divisions between servers that are separate and secure.
Though the temptation may be to move to the cloud as soon as possible, companies must address limiting factors such as software, internal database dependencies and efficiency. Cloud hosting systems can be a money sink if a company is not prepared to fully move their infrastructure, and causes outages due to their own physical servers still being linked in, or if they cannot keep track of cloud use. The cloud represents the current high point for hosting, but companies need to be sure they are ready for the move up from virtualization.
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