Hybrid Cloud Hosting
Hybrid Cloud hosting is by no means something new. However there are a lot more options now and the major cloud hosting providers have settled down in terms of pricing and functionality in the services they provide.
Today we will focus on a few cloud services, such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and some solutions hosted entirely by Group 4 Networks.
G4NS has hosting for two different types of cloud solutions, such as remote file syncing access, provided by OwnCloud. OwnCloud works off of our servers in a data center. We install the OwnCloud client on your computer and configure it to connect to our server. OwnCloud is easily accessible from iPhone and Android devices as well using the OwnCloud client. The beauty of OwnCloud is the fact it’s hosted by us and the support you receive is top notch and instant. We can allocate as much space as you need for your files, 5, 20 or 100GB. We can even fine-tune the permissions for your employees accounts so you control who will see what. Every few minutes the OwnCloud app on your pc checks for any differences in files and synchronizes the new files.
Similar to our OwnCloud solution is our remote desktop solution. The remote desktop solution is perfect for those who want all off their work related data on one server that’s safe and secure. With the remote desktop solution you remotely access a server and you get your own desktop, just as you would on your home pc. As with our OwnCloud service, you can dictate who gets access to what and how much storage you may need. Connecting is super easy. The best part is if you need to travel from one office to another, just close your session. The next time you login to the server, everything you had open will remain open, just as you left it, so you can get back to work with ease.
Microsoft is of course a big player in the cloud computing market. Microsoft platform is called “Azure”. Azure can be used for very complex cloud hosting such as hosting virtual machines or development environments. It can also be used for simple hosting such as storage, to store your files on Microsoft servers. Your backups can also be saved to Azure. What’s great about Azure is that your data gets replicated to multiple Azure servers. This will greatly increase the connection speed no matter where you are. Another service is the ability to create virtual networks between Azure servers and your organizations physical computer network. Azure uses pay as you go billing, so you only pay for how much you use. This way you won’t need to be committed to paying a high fee when you hardly used the service in the last month.
Amazon Web Services is the last product on our list for now. It’s short name is AWS. Like Azure, it too features billing on the amount of usage that was utilized for the month. The different services available are also similar to Azure. Website hosting, to store your website for your company, database hosting to quickly and effectively access your company database from anywhere. Amazon CloudFront is another service on the AWS platform to easily distribute content worldwide, splitting the balance between multiple geographical locations. Finally, if your organization focuses on a lot of computation tasks like for research, one could use the Amazon EC2 service, instead of dedicated and expensive servers in a data center of your own.
Hybrid clouds exists in specific environments when the resources of internal company servers are used along side with some third party hosting provider, be it Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure. Both providers have services that can be used to let your AWS or Azure cloud communicate directly to your company’s internal network, thus giving you the ability to run a hybrid cloud setup.
Hybrid cloud’s are very useful when a company may not have powerful enough hardware to do certain tasks such as computing scientific equations or models, and need the internal network to communicate with their Amazon cloud server, which is doing the actual computing work. Another example for hybrid cloud use is offloading data to a server powered by Azure, in case an internal system fails, but the company employees still need access to that data.
If you are interested in our cloud services or want more information on other cloud services, don’t hesitate to give Group 4 Networks a shout.
