Business entrepreneurs must make a multitude of crucial decisions. They have to think about recruitment, website names, expansion, legal considerations, and budgets, to name a few. One thing that should be high on every entrepreneur’s list is their IT infrastructure, including the choice between traditional IT infrastructure and cloud computing.
Cloud providers offer businesses a variety of benefits, such as the reduced need for hardware, flexibility, and accessibility, as well as cost savings from eliminating hardware maintenance and repair. However, it’s not for everyone.
Today’s workplace is dominated by technology. There are two main ways to set up IT systems. There’s traditional IT infrastructure and cloud computing.
Read on to learn the difference between the two and decide which is best for your business.
- What is Traditional IT Infrastructure?
- Understanding Cloud Computing
- 5 key differences between Cloud Computing and Traditional IT Infrastructure
- Cloud Computing vs Traditional IT Infrastructure
What is Traditional IT Infrastructure?
Traditional IT infrastructure relies on physical hardware housed on-premises. Employees can access systems via a desktop or laptop computer.
Those computers connect, either by cable or wirelessly, to network hardware. This connects all the computers together and to a server. The server holds company data and the applications employees use for their work.
As a company grows, it needs to invest in expanding its IT infrastructure. An increased workload requires more employees. Those employees need extra hardware on site. It’s up to an infrastructure manager to coordinate this.
In traditional IT infrastructure, businesses need IT professionals on hand. They are responsible for routine maintenance and can respond in the event of an incident – such us hardware failure, security breaches, or software issues.
Hardware and software components in traditional IT infrastructure
IT infrastructure is made up of three elements: hardware, software, and networking.
Hardware refers to the physical IT components; basically anything that you can touch. This includes servers; hard drives and data centres for storage; computers, laptops, and mobile devices; routers and network cables, and printers.
The software is the non-physical aspect, comprising programs and apps, operating systems, and virtual machines.
Networking covers things like internet connectivity, VPNs, and security features such as firewalls. All of these components are installed on the premises and owned by your company.
Understanding Cloud Computing
Cloud computing became possible thanks to advances in internet technology. It allows businesses to access their data and software remotely.
Companies that use cloud infrastructure own less hardware. All they need is a terminal, such as a laptop, and internet access. Less hardware means a reduced need for an IT department to maintain it.
The longer a company operates, the more data it accrues. With traditional IT infrastructure, that means investing in more expensive server hardware. Cloud computing handles this differently. Businesses generally rent server space on shared servers. They need only increase the space they’re paying for by increments. This makes it easier to manage costs.
Many operations need a lot of computing power. MLOps, for example, need a lot of data processing. The MLOps definition has changed over time, but the core focus is developing machine learning solutions. This technology underpins advancements in AI.
Cloud infrastructure allows companies to undertake big data processing. They can do so without the need for huge investments in computing power.
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Types of cloud computing environments
There are four main types of cloud computing environments: private, public, hybrid, and multi-cloud.
- Private clouds provide services to a single organization and are typically located on-premises. Although they provide greater data security and control, maintenance costs are high.
- Public clouds are the opposite—they are managed by third-party vendors and cater for multiple organizations. Examples include Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS). They’re more cost-efficient, but users don’t have full control.
- Hybrid clouds, as the name suggests, are a combination of the two. The pairing of environments gives you flexibility (but that comes with a higher cost).
- Multi-clouds bring together multiple public clouds from different service providers, meaning no lock-in with a single vendor.
It’s up to you to decide which of these would best suit your business. But you also have to choose the type of cloud computing services you want to access. Here you have three main options: Software as a service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and Platform as a service (PaaS).
Cloud computing examples
SaaS is the most common form of cloud computing. It just means that instead of downloading software and installing it on your computers, you subscribe to a vendor’s software products and access them from any internet-connected device.
The vendor is responsible for maintenance and troubleshooting, saving technical staff a lot of time. Buying specialist software outright can be expensive, so SaaS is a good way of managing costs.
IaaS provides a virtualized computing infrastructure managed by a provider while you purchase, install, configure, and manage your own software. This approach enables you to enhance your existing infrastructure and operating systems by picking and choosing the tools you need.
For example, you might want to set up a testing environment for app development, or use IaaS to host an ecommerce website. You can scale up or down as demand fluctuates.
PaaS offers a complete development and deployment environment in the cloud, enabling you to manage the applications and services you develop while the vendor takes care of security, infrastructure, and data integration.
It gives you the building blocks for creating software, including servers, code libraries, programming environments, and development tools. This makes app building, hosting, and testing faster and more cost-effective.
Well-known examples of SaaS products include Zoom and Slack, as well as file-sharing software like Google Drive and Dropbox. In the latter, documents are stored in the cloud, enabling you to collaborate remotely and share large files that can’t fit in an email.
IBM’s virtual servers are an example of IaaS, while PaaS includes the AWS Lambda serverless computing platform that lets developers run code without provisioning or managing servers.
Other use cases for cloud computing include big data analysis, since the cloud gives you huge amounts of storage and processing power—plus enhanced security. Datadog and Collibra are examples of data analysis platforms.
Data governance and cybersecurity are also made easier with cloud computing.
5 key differences between Cloud Computing and Traditional IT Infrastructure
You’ve probably noticed some differences between these two IT infrastructures. Let’s now dig a little deeper into five of them.
Cost considerations
Traditional IT infrastructure requires a lot of initial investment. Businesses need to buy lots of hardware, which can quickly get expensive. On top of that, there’s the cost of maintenance and inevitable repairs. Eventually, hardware will need upgrading, which often means large one-off purchases.
Cloud infrastructure requires a minimal initial investment. All a company needs is computers and internet access. The company needs to pay providers, usually on a subscription basis. Those costs are often outweighed by savings from eliminating hardware maintenance and repair.
Scalability and limitations
Apart from the substantial cost, scaling traditional IT infrastructure is difficult. Hardware takes up physical space. As a company expands, it needs more servers, network hardware, and desktops. Once a business maxes out its property, the only solution is new premises. Additionally, sourcing and installing new hardware is a time sink.
If you’re looking to move your business to the cloud, you may want to hire app developers to help manage the transition.
It’s a myth that the cloud doesn’t need computing hardware. As any cloud developer will tell you, it actually requires a lot. However, the burden of finding space for that hardware falls on the cloud provider. Businesses using cloud services need only pay for what they use. They can quickly arrange with the provider if they suddenly need more capacity.
Security features and risks
Traditional IT infrastructure requires robust security measures. The business is fully responsible for the security of data. With hardware on-site, physical security at the premises needs to be good. Also, systems need securing too. There are cost implications that come along with this. Cybersecurity expertise can be expensive.
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Many business leaders may feel uneasy entrusting their data to a third party. Cloud providers are incentivized to ensure security arrangements are up to snuff. They’d face reputational damage, financial harm, and even legal trouble in the event of a breach. Of course, the same is true of a business using traditional IT infrastructure.
Accessibility and flexibility
This is one of the stark differences between each infrastructure. Traditional IT has all the equipment based in the office. That means employees must be present on-site.
A major selling point of the cloud is the accessibility and flexibility it can provide. All an employee needs is a computer and internet access. They can use work applications and access company data from anywhere. This allows for fully remote working. Some managers worry this could be detrimental to collaboration. However, many SaaS providers provide excellent communication and collaboration tools.
Ease of maintenance
Maintaining traditional IT infrastructure is a costly and time-consuming pursuit. Businesses need skilled IT workers to undertake maintenance and react in an emergency. If an incident occurs, this can cause downtime and increase costs.
Cloud providers are responsible for maintaining system infrastructure. In the event of an outage at their data center, cloud providers can respond quickly. Cloud computing experts can rely on spare capacity and redundancies to keep businesses online.
Cloud Computing vs Traditional IT Infrastructure
Traditional IT infrastructure is not without merit. It’s arguably more secure.
Business leaders can feel in control. Depending on a business’s scale and growth potential, it could be the way to go.
Yet, today it can feel like clinging to a physical fax machine in the face of technology like fax broadcasting or email. Cloud infrastructure offers a flexible, scalable, cost-effective solution for modern business.
There’s no denying that infrastructure projects are quite a task. Selecting the right IT computing model that is suitable for a business’s daily operations is a crucial business decision.
Traditionally, SMEs have used traditional IT systems but now it is common to switch to cloud computing. However, migrating a business IT infrastructure to the cloud is not an easy (or cheap) task. It takes expertise to migrate from one infrastructure to the other. It departments are often not ready to take on such a task, or take the time to find a good provider willing and able to help. A hybrid approach is sometimes a good combination, too.
Cloud computing is no longer the future; it’s the present. The degree to which your business embraces it depends on a few factors. If you need to be flexible and grow fast, then cloud computing is the solution you’re looking for. Cloud computing enables your business to scale at its own pace, allowing you to focus on growth.
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