Public cloud presents unique challenges, says Securicom
ecuricom says companies are discovering that the public cloud presents some unique challenges

Public cloud presents unique challenges, says Securicom

South African businesses are increasingly shifting applications, services and infrastructure to the cloud where they are more accessible and available.

However, Securicom says companies are discovering that the public cloud presents some unique challenges.

“South African businesses switching to the public cloud need to consider that their data could be located anywhere on the globe,” said Douw Gerber, from Securicom.

“AWS typically lets you select a data centre location, but these are all located in Europe, Asia or USA at present.  This introduces latency issues in applications that may be latency-sensitive for customers in sub-Sahara Africa in general. What this means is that data transmission might be affected by spikes in use across the internet. If application performance is a deal breaker for you, then the private cloud certainly trumps the public cloud.”

Gerber says the public cloud is based on shared physical hardware which is owned and operated by a third-party providerk and the infrastructure is shared across numerous customers. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are examples of public clouds. Data centres are situated all over the world, with none in South Africa.

“On the other hand, a private cloud is infrastructure dedicated entirely to your business,” added Gerber.

“It is hosted on-site or in a service provider’s data centre. Private clouds offer a lot of advantages over the public cloud, with one of the most important, from a speed and performance perspective, being that they are in closer proximity. This obviously eliminates the latency issues that are experienced with the public cloud, while still benefitting from the joys of cloud computing.

“In fact, we typically see between two-times and five-times increase in performance over both public cloud and other virtualised infrastructures when compared to Cloudistics. For some highly transactional or data heavy applications we have seen specific operations attain 8x performance over AWS.”

Cloudistics, a cloud software appliance technology that brings the benefits of the public cloud into companies’ own data centres, Cloudistics is the first on-premise (private) cloud in the world to provide for virtualisation, compute, network and storage; natively and imbedded, on one platform to deliver a premium private cloud experience.

A Cloudistics appliance can be installed within companies’ own H/Q data centre or a local co-location facility, meaning that users have high bandwidth, low-latency access to critical resources.

“Cloudistics is designed, from the ground up, to deliver extreme performance for virtualised applications,” said Gerber.

“Today, it is the fastest platform available for virtualised x86 (Windows, Linux & Docker) based applications.

“This comes from a close and cluster-less integration of compute, storage and network resources that removes the bottlenecks that plague other infrastructures today as they scale to meet the growing demands of the applications they must support.

 

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