Scalability is one of the most attractive features of the cloud. It lets you meet demand-based business requirements, whether those demands are the results of ads, business growth, seasonal activity or economic cycles.
However, scalability is more than just provisioning more technology and/or increasing a data center footprint. Scaling horizontally to add hardware is the easy part. Data centers have been doing it for years, first as managed service offerings and now as enterprise caliber cloud offerings.
However, the ability to scale vertically is one of the most attractive features of an Enterprise Cloud. As your business grows, it also becomes more complex, and an Enterprise Cloud offers not just the infrastructure but also the service offerings you need, such as advanced data management services, enhanced security services and multi-site integration to support the complexity of your business.
Storage Tiering Services
As your data grows to multiple terabytes, you need storage tiering to deliver the right scaling costs at the right performance levels. Tiered storage, where different classes of storage are defined and available depending on the storage tier/data requirement, allows for the matching of performance and costs to the specific data-set and application(s).
Enhanced Security Services
Similarly, as your technology footprint grows, you need additional security services beyond the standard firewall, VPN and related security access. Examples include host-based intrusion prevention, log management/analytics and, in many cases, security information event management (SIEM). Additional monitoring/reporting tools that report on capacity, performance and health are needed to make informed decisions across the application(s) architecture.
Multi-site Integration
In addition, since everything is not likely to be in the cloud, you need the ability to inter-connect your Cloud environment to collocated or other managed environments as well as SaaS or self-hosted application infrastructure. This version of the hybrid cloud will continue to build in demand and necessity as more enterprises embrace the various delivery mechanisms, including SaaS, Managed Services, Cloud, Colocation, etc. Finally, the Enterprise Cloud gives you access to the technical specialists and experts that can help you manage the new challenges.
When you think about scaling your business, recognize that three components—technology, services and people—are needed to scale it. The Enterprise Cloud makes all those components available as you need them.
Will your data grow beyond your current data center practices in 2012?
Learn more about SunGard’s Enterprise Cloud Services.
