Private cloud on Public cloud…
First of all, when you are considering bringing your company to the Cloud, it is important to know what kind of ‘’cloud’’ is offered for you.
There is plenty of confusion, around this – and in particular what different offerings actually entail. While different terms are used by different people – in my words you would be looking at the following as the predominant choices in the market.
Multi-tenant Public cloud system
Key to understand on this offering is the following:
- When the setup is multi-tenanted, your company will be sharing resources with neighbors on the same platform. You run a risk of having ‘’noisy neighbors’’. In other words: if they use a lot of resources for their system, it will impact performance on your system – as you share them.
- Multi-tenancy will not be as flexible. It can’t be, as you will need to share a similar setup with the other users on the platform. Some platforms will allow for running of some add-ons, but you will never have the complete freedom to run any add-on – or bespoke development and integrations.
- Related to that, the multi-tenant environment will always drive ‘’forced’’ patches and upgrades. While there is benefits in getting this done for you, bear in mind that this could impact any add-ons you run – and again impacts the possibilities for bespoke integrations.
- Multi-tenancy, by its nature, has the risk of being less secure. Take the example of Ransomware; once it gets in with one of your neighbours – it also opens the door to your system!
Yes – it will typically be a very cost-effective offering. But there are reasons for that…
Private Cloud – or hosted system
A Private Cloud setup, either provided by a partner or provided by a 3rd party.
Main reasoning for this type of approach is that it negates a lot of the drawbacks of a Multi-tenant public cloud:
- It is dedicated to you, so remains completely flexible for add-ons and bespoke development.
- It should provide stronger performance.
- It should be more secure, as it is a dedicated system that may be segregated from any other customer systems.
But this approach does typically have a number of drawbacks:
- It tends to be more expensive – once the system is sized and provisioned right
- You typically have additional costs, as each system needs to be build for the company. Eg setup costs, management costs if it is a managed service.
- And/or you are faced with the challenge that as you need to do more of the management of the system. Did you ever truly consider the cost to your business of the resources that need to manage this?
It tends to be more expensive – once the system is sized and provisioned right
Important elements to be aware of
Then there are elements that might be hidden, but that will impact the service you are looking to provide to your company (and some of these elements apply to certain multi-tenant platforms as well…)
- Is the system provided as secure as it could be? Do you know that all steps to properly de-risk a Ransomware attack have been taken?
- Is the system sized absolutely correctly? For example, is the RDS (remote connection) setup in such a way that the resources are shared by too many users, potentially hitting the performance for the end user?
- What is in place when ‘’everything goes wrong’’ – in other words: what happens if the data centre that the system is in goes down? Is there a fail-over, how quickly will you get your system back?
- What is the expertise of your hosting provider? They might be great at technical infrastructure piece, but do they really understand and have experience with SAP Business One. Especially when you look at systems that entail add-ons or bespoke development and integrations, this will bring its own intricacies
- If you manage the environments yourself: what are both the costs & risks of needing the resources with the correct skill sets to manage all of this? Does it challenge your business when moving to HANA? Are you now strongly dependent on one person with all the knowledge & know-how?
Do you know that all steps to properly de-risk a Ransomware attack have been taken?
All of these points need to be considered, and can typically bring a real challenge. Look to select a lesser of two evils but stay fully aware of the drawbacks you are signing up to.
Would you like to know more? Just message us here and we will get it setup.
