Cloud or Managed Service : What is the difference?

February 15, 2013

Firstly, cloud computing is not managed hosting. They are two completely different service layers. One refers to a compute resource ie RAM, Chip set and a host, the other to a management resource

The term cloud computing refers to the actual computing layer at a resource level. Cloud computing is generically defined as an elastic and redundant computing resource usually in a multi-tenant environment. Cloud computing and Virtulisation are both very closely related

Managed hosting refers to the managed service layer that sits on top of the computing resource layer. This management layer is generally made up of two and sometimes 3 elements:

  1. Hardware & Network management
  2. OS management including basic service management i.e. Windows, Apache, IIS etc
  3. Application management i.e MS SQL, MS Exchange, MS Dynamics etc

Then there is an additional segment to the term ‘managed hosting’ being ‘complex managed hosting’ Complex managed hosting usually refers to more complex environments that may involve application management, v-lans, load balancing, complex SAN in our case 3PAR configurations and the configurations/management of these in addition to the regular inclusions of managed hosting. Complex managed hosting is typically referring to multiple server (per project) environments rather than single server environments

If you look at Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a good example of cloud computing, they do not provide any Layer 7 management services as standard inclusions. They provide simple compute instance and that’s pretty much it. You need to perform all your own systems administration including OS, services, applications etc.

C24 is a traditionally, managed service providers (MSP) that provides the management layer on top of dedicated servers and virtulisation layers. The recent explosion of ‘cloud computing’ or cloud instances has now seen these MSP’s offer a management layer on top of ‘cloud instances’.

While people require a compute resource they will also require a management resource. Some may perform the management in-house, while others may decide to outsource the management. Most MSP’s provide both the cloud compute layer and management as a combined service.

To put cloud computing into a really simple model, it essentially takes the focus off the physical hardware layer and places the focus on a computing as a resource. Virtulisation works pretty much the same except you still have a host node. The underlying technology that most cloud computing platforms reside on is no different to traditional virtulisation without the focus on the hardware resource. Many cloud compute platforms still use as an example Citrix Xen, VMWare or Parallels as the platform on which to provide their instances, yet the instances are spread over a number of clustered hardware nodes. Cloud computing and Virtulisation still deal with the deployment of instances or virtual machines as a compute resource with zero focus on the hardware.

Many people incorrectly define cloud computing and virtulisation. They are both very similar yet different enough to deserve different definitions. Additionally many refer to items such as SaaS as cloud computing. SaaS (Software As A Service) as an example may or not be delivered via a cloud computing model. A service provider may deliver SaaS via a dedicated hardware resource which would not qualify as a cloud computing service.

C24 is a complex managed service provider as we do the whole piece from design, implementation, network installation, full system monitoring that includes the hardware, software and comms stack and delivers applications at speed globally. We truly are a specialist provider.

3 Comments | Application Hosting, Managed Service Hosting, Marketing | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by david ricketts

C24s business intelligence solution is child’s play

December 13, 2012

C24 have seen a significant uptake of our Bi24 business intelligence solution over the last year. The solution has been applauded for it ease of use and the speed of installation.

The following is a comment from a recent research document that highlights the strengths of the solution:

“Business intelligence (BI) technology holds out much promise, but experience would tend to indicate that it can be difficult to use, requiring specialist skills and imposing considerable latency between need and information delivery. Bi24 addresses these issues for many business needs and the ease-of-use has to be seen to be appreciated. The technology is built on the well regarded Lucene open software search technology and because of this most things are possible. While Bi24 does not give much profile to unstructured data search, a great deal of functionality is delivered out-of-the-box so that email and documents can be incorporated into search and analytic’s functionality. The key to understanding the power of Bi24 is that it provides a search approach to BI.”

“What this means on a day-to-day level is that business users can formulate their own analytical and search needs with ease. This is a highly pragmatic, but in no way compromised BI tool and we would recommend that organisations of all sizes should look at the offering.”

To prove the point the below image is of the daughter of a BI lead who is using the Venn elements of the solution for her homework

IMAG0600

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Posted by david ricketts

C24 client wins major IT award from the magazine ‘The Manufacturer’

November 30, 2012

C24 are extremely proud to hear that one of our major clients, Origin Enterprises, has recently been presented with the award ‘ICT in Manufacturing’ by the magazine The Manufacturer. It was awarded for ‘the implementation and management of an effective information and communication technology infrastructure that has brought improved competitive positioning and operational excellence through an engaged user-base’.

The considerable judgement criteria evaluated a number of strict areas that included:

a) Is the ICT’s deployment aligned with the business aims and objectives with clearly defined short-term and long-term goals

b) Has the ICT infrastructure investment been effective in the last three years

c) Is the ICT infrastructure streamlined so that it is fully integrated across all business functions

d) The level of success the project has shown in fulfilling its objectives

e) Quantifiable returns on the ICT investment

f) Is the company assessing or applying leading and/or advanced IT solutions

Comment from Paul Hemming MD C24 Ltd

This is fantastic recognition for Origin Enterprises and is reward for all the hard work their team has done over the last 18 months. The C24 and Origin Enterprise teams have been working together on various key IT projects; both on-premise and hosted, for a considerable time and we are proud to have helped them achieve such a prestigious award.

Comment from Derek Wilson CIO Origin Enterprises

C24 provide Origin Enterprises, and our associated businesses, a range of managed IT services including the management and deployment of our Microsoft Dynamics ERP infrastructural solution and the delivery of our warehouse management system. Since our initial engagement the two companies have developed a key strategic relationship, that has seen C24 not only manage the day to day delivery of our business applications infrastructure but them also being involved in a number of other critical on premise IT deployments.

The C24 relationship is a key element to the success of our current hosted IT infrastructure and we can only see the relationship continuing to develop in the future.

For more information about C24 please visit www.c24.co.uk

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Posted by david ricketts

Cloud types, Private, Public and Hybrid – team C24

October 7, 2011

Cloud computing comes in three forms: public clouds, private clouds, and hybrids clouds. Depending on the type of data you’re working with, you’ll want to compare public, private, and hybrid clouds in terms of the different levels of security and management required.

Cloud Model

Public Clouds

A public cloud is basically the internet. Service providers use the internet to make resources, such as applications (also known as Software-as-a-service) and storage, available to the general public, or on a ‘public cloud. Examples of public clouds include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), IBM’s Blue Cloud, Sun Cloud, Google AppEngine and Windows Azure Services Platform.

For users, these types of clouds will provide the best economies of scale, are inexpensive to set-up because hardware, application and bandwidth costs are covered by the provider. It’s a pay-per-usage model and the only costs incurred are based on the capacity that is used.

There are some limitations, however; the public cloud may not be the right fit for every organization. The model can limit configuration, security, and SLA specificity, making it less-than-ideal for services using sensitive data that is subject to compliancy regulations.

Private Clouds

Private clouds are data center architectures owned by a single company that provides flexibility, scalability, provisioning, automation and monitoring. The goal of a private cloud is not sell “as-a-service” offerings to external customers but instead to gain the benefits of cloud architecture without giving up the control of maintaining your own data center.

Private clouds can be expensive with typically modest economies of scale. This is usually not an option for the average Small-to-Medium sized business and is most typically put to use by large enterprises. Private clouds are driven by concerns around security and compliance, and keeping assets within the firewall.

Hybrid Clouds

By using a Hybrid approach, companies can maintain control of an internally managed private cloud while relying on the public cloud as needed. For instance during peak periods individual applications, or portions of applications can be migrated to the Public Cloud. This will also be beneficial during predictable outages: hurricane warnings, scheduled maintenance windows, rolling brown/blackouts.

The ability to maintain an off-premise disaster recovery site for most organizations is impossible due to cost. While there are lower cost solutions and alternatives the lower down the spectrum an organization gets, the capability to recover data quickly reduces. Cloud based Disaster Recovery (DR)/Business Continuity (BC) services allow organizations to contract failover out to a Managed Services Provider that maintains multi-tenant infrastructure for DR/BC, and specializes in getting business back online quickly.

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Posted by david ricketts

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