A day very rarely goes past when cloud computing is not mentioned within the walls of our offices or those of our clients.
Compared to a year ago, it's amazing how important and pervasive cloud computing is becoming in our clients minds for business performance and agility.
One of the repeated conversations we have with clients is about business efficiency through collaboration (email, wiki, team sites, IM, Web Conferencing and Social Computing…) and can this (and should this) be run in the cloud. Well most of the enterprise class cloud/SaaS providers offer a combination of dedicated or multi tenant architectures both with their pros and cons. Many organisations are also interested in a hybrid cloud such as Microsoft BPOS where there is infrastructure still on premise and key components and users are hosted in the cloud.
The future of cloud-based collaboration is clearly multi-tenant for two economic reasons:
- 1. Multi-tenant enables the fundamental economic benefits of a shared resource.
- 2. Multi-tenant is a much faster way to deploy improvements.
Multi-tenant is also the path that every major cloud collaboration vendor is on. Microsoft, for example, is running Exchange Online in a multi-tenant solution that now scales past 25,000 seats. Salesforce.com and Google have always been multi-tenant.
So when would the cost of a dedicated architecture in the cloud suit your business model, there are typically three of these:
- 1. If you are not satisfied with the security architecture proposed by multi tenant architectures.
- 2. If your collaboration application must be highly customised and integrated tightly with other applications.
- 3. If you workload won't run in a virtual machine.
So if cloud is for you and you need to understand your strategy, you really need to talk to Dataplex.