- [Instructor] In this video, let's consider an on-premise
versus a cloud design, when it comes to our data centers.
For many years, companies have had very large rooms
where they've had, maybe, raised floors with HVAC
and lots of power and redundant power,
and racks and racks of servers.
They've stored their data locally.
Prior to that, there were server farms.
But a lot of companies have internal data centers,
however, there's a lot of expensive involved
in maintaining the power and the servers themselves.
So what a lot of enterprises are now doing,
they're migrating having the data centers on-site
or on-premise, they're migrating those data centers
to the cloud.
Maybe they partner with a cloud provider,
such as Amazon or Google or Microsoft,
and they use those virtual servers up in the cloud,
to store their resources.
One design question that comes to mind,
if we do move to the cloud with our data is,
how do we access that data securely?
Well, one option would be to send traffic over the internet.
The challenge there is, the internet tends to be
an untrusted network, but we can send our data securely
over the internet if we use some sort of a VPN,
a virtual private network, where we're going to be doing
some encryption of our data.
That way, if anybody intercepts the data,
they're not going to be able to read it,
because it's all encrypted.
Another option, besides using the internet,
is to use some sort of a private wide area connection.
A couple of examples there would include
MPLS or Metro Ethernet.
Now let's take a look at a few design considerations
for on-premise versus cloud.
First of all, with a cloud deployment, we don't need to have
all of this redundant power at our site.
We don't have to have all the UPS user generator backup,
we don't have to purchase the hardware, in other words.
We don't have to go out and buy these massive servers
and racks, we don't have to use floor space in our building.
And also, with a cloud deployment,
we pay for the resources that we use,
instead of necessarily buying a server that we might do
for an on-premise design, we can just pay for the usage
of a virtual server up in the cloud.
However, there are arguments for keeping data on-premise
as well, for example, with on-premise deployments
it might be easier to meet compliance requirements,
where maybe we have a back-up's taken every so often,
or we've got the servers physically secured.
Another consideration for an on-premise deployment
is that it might be able to better ensure
a good user experience, because we can control
the bandwidth coming into our site.
We don't really have that much control
of the cloud provider.
We might be able to monitor performance better,
if things are onsite.
And what a lot of enterprises are doing, realizing that,
in some cases, it's better to have the data on-site,
in some cases it's better to have the data in the cloud,
what a lot of enterprises are doing is,
they're using a hybrid deployment.
That's where we're combining on-premise
for storage of some data,
and cloud for the storage of other data.
And another challenge we might have with a cloud deployment
is, if we want to switch cloud providers.
Here let's say that this enterprise
is going to be selecting between these three cloud providers,
cloud providers one, two and three.
Well, there could be a lot of administrative overhead
to try to switch providers to stop peering
with one provider and start peering with another provider.
But if we want to bit more flexibility with that,
what we can do is have an intercloud exchange.
This is a service that a company might offer us
where we can connect just to them.
We peer with the intercloud exchange,
and then they peer with the different cloud providers.
And if we say, "I just decided, because of a rate increase,
"that I want to switch from cloud provider one
"to cloud provider three,"
it's their responsibility to do that re-peering.
All we've done is peered with them,
and we don't have to worry about re-peering
with another cloud provider.
That's a benefit of an intercloud exchange.
And that's an overview of some considerations
for an on-premise versus a cloud design.