By Michael Miller
It's a question that's often asked in the association world. Should we virtualize our servers or take everything to the cloud? Really there is no correct answer to this long standing debate over which is better for an association or non-profit organization. The answer is usually defined by the culture of the organization in most cases.
I have found that some associations like to have their infrastructure fully built out and not relying on third parties other than an ISP to keep them self sufficient. Then you have the other type of organization that fears the worst and wants to offload every technology component and run a variety of SaaS applications which to them, is an insurance policy against a disaster. Sure your data is offsite, sure your end users can access it from anywhere but what happens when your service provider or your SaaS application goes down? Uh oh!
We here at Alexandria Networks have been using a hybrid approach to this debate for some time now. While we still like to have our data local, we do have a mixed bag of tricks that we use daily for our network infrastructure. For e-mail and messaging, we are 100% in the cloud with Microsoft's BPOS Hosted Exchange. It was an easy migration for us to make and we were able to take advantage of this complimentary solution from Microsoft since we're a partner of their services. It just made sense.
We still have our local VMware 4.1 infrastructure with our 4 TB SAN running Windows 2008 R2 64 bit Terminal Server, Windows 2008 R2 as a domain controller or two and our help-desk ticketing and our AnyWare remote monitoring and management servers in our data center in Alexandria. We host our own accounting package on our local servers and back that up to the cloud by way of a Barracuda 190 Backup Appliance and their Cloud Storage service. This setup for us has proved to work very well for us as e-mail seems to never go down, we can have full use of Outlook using RPC over HTTPS whether we are in the office, away from the office or traveling. Access to the accounting software can still be accomplished by Terminal Services as well as other local data on our network but we're able to sleep safe at night, knowing that our data is backed up both locally and then de-duped then sent to Barracuda's Cloud Storage.
We like the hybrid approach for now. It's safe, bullet-proof and works for us. A lot of our clients are adapting similar approaches when it comes to virtualizing or taking their data to the cloud.
Our recommendation for clients with 5 to 10 servers in house would be talk to you staff to find out how resistant to change they really are. If they seem to not adapt to change well, virtualize your large and aging environment while slowing making some services accessible via the cloud. If your staff looks forward to change and wants a highly scalable solution that can grow with the association, maybe it's time to look more seriously at cloud services.
Contact us for more information on either virtualization or cloud services at http://www.alexandrianetworks.com/ or call us at 703-772-4243.
I have found that some associations like to have their infrastructure fully built out and not relying on third parties other than an ISP to keep them self sufficient. Then you have the other type of organization that fears the worst and wants to offload every technology component and run a variety of SaaS applications which to them, is an insurance policy against a disaster. Sure your data is offsite, sure your end users can access it from anywhere but what happens when your service provider or your SaaS application goes down? Uh oh!
We here at Alexandria Networks have been using a hybrid approach to this debate for some time now. While we still like to have our data local, we do have a mixed bag of tricks that we use daily for our network infrastructure. For e-mail and messaging, we are 100% in the cloud with Microsoft's BPOS Hosted Exchange. It was an easy migration for us to make and we were able to take advantage of this complimentary solution from Microsoft since we're a partner of their services. It just made sense.
We still have our local VMware 4.1 infrastructure with our 4 TB SAN running Windows 2008 R2 64 bit Terminal Server, Windows 2008 R2 as a domain controller or two and our help-desk ticketing and our AnyWare remote monitoring and management servers in our data center in Alexandria. We host our own accounting package on our local servers and back that up to the cloud by way of a Barracuda 190 Backup Appliance and their Cloud Storage service. This setup for us has proved to work very well for us as e-mail seems to never go down, we can have full use of Outlook using RPC over HTTPS whether we are in the office, away from the office or traveling. Access to the accounting software can still be accomplished by Terminal Services as well as other local data on our network but we're able to sleep safe at night, knowing that our data is backed up both locally and then de-duped then sent to Barracuda's Cloud Storage.
We like the hybrid approach for now. It's safe, bullet-proof and works for us. A lot of our clients are adapting similar approaches when it comes to virtualizing or taking their data to the cloud.
Our recommendation for clients with 5 to 10 servers in house would be talk to you staff to find out how resistant to change they really are. If they seem to not adapt to change well, virtualize your large and aging environment while slowing making some services accessible via the cloud. If your staff looks forward to change and wants a highly scalable solution that can grow with the association, maybe it's time to look more seriously at cloud services.
Contact us for more information on either virtualization or cloud services at http://www.alexandrianetworks.com/ or call us at 703-772-4243.
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