Business Indicators to Help You Decide Public vs. Hybrid/Private Cloud

There are myriad technical considerations when deciding how to architect and deploy your cloud infrastructure, but your business structure, size, strategy, and industry are also significant factors. 

You don’t need to take a deep dive into technical evaluations of each workload to choose between public cloud and a hybrid or private infrastructure. It’s possible that your business practices will make that decision for you before you ever get to individual app/system analysis.

Here are the business traits to consider as you weigh your cloud options.

Business Life Stage

The size and/or age of your organization may be enough to dictate your cloud architecture. Startups are ideally suited to the public cloud’s flexibility and lack of asset ownership. They have very little investment in existing infrastructure and may need to adjust on the fly. A monolithic, large company with a multitude of server assets is more likely to look at a hybrid or private cloud approach.

Preferences of Your Finance Department

It can be difficult for CFOs to adjust to the cloud. You’ve probably seen numerous articles discussing the shift to operations expenses (OpEx) when using a subscription computing service rather than capital expenses (CapEx) when purchasing your own equipment. Preference for OpEx or CapEx from your purchasing department might be enough to make the decision for public or private already.

However, having a big war chest available might also make a hybrid deployment attractive, since you have more control over the infrastructure and security. Similarly, bandwidth costs can factor in, especially when migrating to the cloud. A high data volume might mean on-premise components are preferable.

IT Staff Skills and Experience

This category could go either way. Generally, if you don’t have many staff dedicated to helpdesk and support, and limited cloud experience, the public cloud is a good option. If the opposite is true and you have a strong, cloud-focused IT staff, then you’re ready to manage your own cloud infrastructure on-premise or in a hybrid configuration.

It’s not always so simple. Mastering a public cloud platform can be difficult and many of the large providers do not offer responsive support. Your limited staff could be learning on the fly, and if a configuration issue occurs during off hours, you might be scrambling. You need to spend a significant amount with hyperscale public cloud providers, or pay for an additional support contract, in order to gain dedicated support resources.

An on-premise virtualized environment could be a better option for those with limited resources then, as long as your staff knows the platform. Or you could use a smaller, “boutique” provider or MSP who has wide experience with cloud platforms and technologies. They can help you with a public or a hybrid/private infrastructure, filling your staff gap regardless of the architecture.