Cloud Hosting

One difficulty of planning to move your ERP to the cloud: The term is largely a marketing creation. Depending on who's doing the talking, cloud can mean many different things. No wonder there is still a lot of confusion about the different types of cloud computing.

"Cloud is more of a branding and marketing apparatus for the industry to package services in a consumable way," than it is a term with concrete meaning, said Stephen Moss, senior vice president of managed technologies at PCM, an IT services provider.

Chris LeBeau, director of IT at Advanced Technology Services chimed in, "Many people are still confused, and sometimes fooled, by deployment options that vendors slap the cloud buzzword on, but [which] are really the old hosting model that simply takes what might have been on-premises and puts it in the vendor's data center."

This arrangement describes classic IT outsourcing or managed services, and it has existed for decades.

Cloud, on the other hand, carries the connotation of services and software being delivered and maintained by a provider, along with an IT infrastructure.

"The cloud to me is more based on next-generation services and the ability to continue to innovate and enhance your processes," Moss said. Cloud is, by nature, more dynamic than IT outsourcing.

Sorting through the different types of cloud computing is an important task before proceeding with migration planning for ERP. The selection of platforms and types of cloud computing services can affect your costs, degree of flexibility and security, as well as the amount of customization that is possible.

When most people talk about cloud today, they are referring to the shifting of IT infrastructure from running on-premises to running in a cloud provider's environment. The software, platforms or IT infrastructures are maintained by a services provider in the public cloud (such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure) or the private cloud (one operated by a services provider).

With public cloud, the deployment may be multi-tenant, where infrastructure is shared by more than one company, thereby reducing costs, or private -- also called single tenant -- where the customer has its own dedicated database and code base, resulting in comparatively higher costs. A software as a service (SaaS) ERP system is a type of public cloud application that can be either single or multi-tenant.

Today, most manufacturers that have migrated to the cloud have hybrid cloud environments, meaning they use a mix of different types of cloud computing and on-premises deployments of IT resources for the optimal balance of agility and cost. Hybrid environments are often necessary, as cloud ERP vendors do not always have every capability a manufacturer might need. Functions such as distribution and warehousing are easily carved off to reside either on-premises or with a different cloud service provider.

Private cloud allows a much greater degree of customization than public -- where there is little to no customization -- but at a price. This offering is designed for higher security, as the environment is not shared.

The key when sorting through the different types of cloud computing is to understand, at a high level, what flavor of cloud the ERP vendor provides -- some offer multiple types of cloud computing -- while not getting bogged down in the technicalities.

"Don't get hung up on the type of cloud offering," said Linsey Ryan, principal in the enterprise solutions practice at consulting firm KPMG. "If I were a buyer, I would look at capabilities and how much they cost. Those things are the most important to me."

Start planning a move to cloud ERP

Know what you're getting in a SaaS ERP upgrade

Understand hybrid ERP business processes

Excerpt from:
Cloud ERP move requires grasp of different types of cloud computing - TechTarget

News

It's the latest in a series of surveys that show Microsoft's public cloud gaining developer and admin mindshare.

Although Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) still maintains its lead in the public cloud space, Microsoft's Azure platform may be turning the tide in larger enterprises. A new survey lends credence to that perception.

The survey comes vio Sumo Logic, examining "The New Normal: Cloud, DevOps, and SaaS Analytics Tools Reign in The Modern App Era."

Sumo Logic, which describes itself as a "machine data analytics service," contracted UBM to survey 235 IT operations, application development, and information security professionals at companies with at least 500 employees, with about half of the respondents working at companies with 5,000 or more employees.

At that high end of the enterprise spectrum, the survey found, Azure actually beats AWS.

"In the early days of the cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) took the lead as the cloud computing vendor of choice," the survey report said. "But the survey revealed that as the cloud matures, organizations are becoming more comfortable with vendors other than AWS and are using multiple cloud vendors. In fact, while other reports show that AWS still has a lead in cloud market share, the top cloud vendor in this survey -- which included only organizations with at least 500 employees -- was Microsoft Azure.

"When asked which IaaS or PaaS vendors they were using (with multiple responses allowed), 66 percent of respondents cited Azure. Interestingly, more than half of the Azure users were from organizations with more than 10,000 employees, which suggests that Microsoft's cloud is particularly popular with large enterprises. AWS came in second with 55 percent of respondents, followed by Salesforce App Cloud (28 percent), IBM Cloud (23 percent), and Google Cloud (20 percent)."

This finding reinforces some conclusions from other surveys. For example, last month's survey from Spiceworks Inc. found that Azure beat AWS in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) space. That report said: "In the public cloud IaaS provider category, Microsoft Azure is the most commonly used (16 percent), followed closely by Amazon Web Services (AWS) at 13 percent. Azure is also expected to see the most growth in the next 12 months with 21 percent of IT pros considering it -- while AWS is being considered by 11 percent."

A January report from financial analyst FBR Capital Markets said: "We continue to believe 2016 will be a '206 area code street battle for the cloud,' with Microsoft firmly best positioned as the vendor to compete with AWS on the enterprise cloud front for years to come."

Going further back, a RightScale Inc. report from 2015 said: "Cloud competition for enterprises (1000+ employees) got a lot more interesting in 2015. AWS still maintains a lead (50 percent vs. 49 percent in 2014), but Azure IaaS has closed the gap significantly (19 percent vs. 11 percent in 2014). As a result, the AWS lead in the enterprise narrowed from more than 4x to 2.5x its nearest competitor."

Taken together, these and other reports indicate that if AWS has any vulnerabilities that threaten its longstanding cloud computing leadership, they come at the high end and in IaaS offerings.

However, as mentioned, there are always contrasting reports to point to. For example, brand-new research from VisionMobile Ltd. almost directly disputes the Sumo Logic report.

The VisionMobile survey report said: "Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the most popular primary cloud hosting at every company size. For the smallest companies (1-5 employees) where Amazon has just a 15 percent share, they face very credible competition from Microsoft (12 percent), Google (11 percent), and Digital Ocean (10 percent). However, when we look at larger companies, Amazon's share grows to 26-27 percent at every size, Microsoft stays in the 11-13 percent range, while Google fades along with Digital Ocean."

Among developers, though, that VisionMobile report somewhat echoes the big-company advantage of Azure, stating: "Microsoft shows greater strength equally with developers who target large enterprises, and those who target small to medium businesses (14 percent each)," it continued. "They are weaker with those targeting consumers (11 percent) or professionals (9 percent)."

Moving beyond the issue of market share, other key findings of the Sumo Logic report highlighted by the company include:

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer for 1105 Media.

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New Study Shows AWS Losing Ground to Azure in Enterprises - Virtualization Review