The Covid era has seen many businesses, great and small having to adapt to new ways of working. From migrating from the boardroom to Zoom for meetings, to managing staff working from home for long periods.
Since the initial March 2020 South African lockdown hit us, cloud services have become ever more important as the ideal storage and communication solution for many SMEs and larger businesses, offering them better access to previously inaccessible enterprise-class services, whether it’s from home or the office.
The advantage of public (shared) cloud solutions, such as Microsoft Office 365, as we have mentioned in our February newsletter, include access to effective collaboration tools and the ability to add more remote workers without incurring the on-site overheads.
But what about private cloud hosting? What exactly is it, and why does your business need it, you may ask? If you are already using a public cloud platform, perhaps you think private hosting is not necessary. But there are numerous advantages of using the latter, and in fact, both solutions can be used concurrently, rendering the clunky traditional, physical office server a thing of the past.
Private hosting: the pros without the cons
- The same benefits (as mentioned above) as most public cloud offerings, but also pricing that is, in essence, predictable, more transparent, and therefore simpler.
- By not solely relying on a generic public platform, using private cloud offers businesses the edge with greater availability and reliability.
- Better performance and power, resulting in a highly efficient and user-friendly enterprise solution supporting any application your business needs to use (from software to IT mechanisms).
- The ability to tailor the cloud service to your business’ individual needs.
Only your approved team has access to this solution (it is not shared externally), which means improved security of data. - Regulatory compliance to standards such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is ensured through private cloud hosting by managing PCI- and HIPAA-compliant hosting.
- Improved support.
As more businesses migrate to using cloud services, it is useful to know the advantages of both public and private hosting, and by understanding and embracing these advantages, your business can be ensured of a highly satisfactory, more efficient cloud experience. This, of course, also applies to software and IT companies, who require greater flexibility in the virtualised environments in which they operate, and whose clients demand a top-notch safety net for all their sensitive user data. So if it is better security and greater flexibility, control, versatility and power you are looking for, choosing private cloud services is clearly a no-brainer.
A managed IT services company like Castlerock can not only ensure a smooth transition to using private cloud services (by evaluating and advising which type of cloud environment will best suit your needs), but also a more streamlined user experience that will give you peace of mind knowing that your (and your customers’) data is even safer than before, and your cloud solutions are customised for the specific needs of your business.