The first question a small-midsize business should ask when first considering cloud computing is, "why should we use the cloud?" At a high level, there are three answers that consistently arise as the most compelling and influential reasons: speed, agility, and cost. The cloud enables access to resources in a matter of minutes, or even seconds, as compared to days, weeks, or longer for physical infrastructure expansions. Further, the cloud removes the limitation of physical platforms, in that it can essentially scale indefinitely. The cloud's model, which allows companies to only pay for the resources it uses rather than absorbing all of the sunk costs of physcal hardware in a traditional computing model. In many cases (and that number is increasing daily), these benefits tempt many large and small businesses alike to move quickly into the cloud, but the key thing to remember is that while the cloud is everywhere and is for everyone, it is not for everything. Companies should thoroughly review their internal processes to ensure that the cloud is going to handle their specific requirements. In some cases, the cloud can be customized, but again, this should be heavily reviewed before making any decision to move your business into the cloud.
Since we have now discussed the benefits of the cloud at the cloud level, companies must also review the types of "cloud," which covers many different hosting solutions, including ERP platforms such as SAP Business ByDesign and SAP Business One OnDemand. The following terminology should help you gain a better grasp of what types are available, and what might work best for your small-midsize business.
- The Cloud - problably the most generic, yet most often used term, this more specifically means "public cloud," or in other words, an off-premise, multi-tenant solution that enables a shared cloud computing model. An example of such could be a common collaboration tool like GoogleDocs.
- Private cloud - single tenant solutions hosted on or off premise. An example of this would a true software-as-a-service option like SAP Business ByDesign or SAP Business One OnDemand.
- Dedicated hosting - both virtualized and non-virtualized single tenant computing solutions hosted off-premise. A great example of this, and something that Navigator currently offers is providing hosting for a traditional on-premise ERP solution like SAP Business One.
- Hybrid Hosting - probably the newest term, this is a mix of cloud and dedicated hosting/private cloud in a solution. An example of this would be allowing a person or team to download a GoogleDoc, manipulate it, and then re-upload it back into the cloud environment
