Dedenis spoke at One Channel's conference on the mobile and cloud revolution 2015 last week. I caught up with him to get answers to some of the most pressing questions about cloud computing at the moment.
1. List a few of the data ownership issues that come from working in the cloud...
Dedenis: Complete control and freedom of choice on which cloud vendor as well as which cloud to go with - public, private or hybrid cloud (more on these in my answer to question 4 below) - is key to maintaining data sovereignty and ownership of data. Only with these criteria in place can users be assured that they can reap the full benefits of cloud, which is scalability and unlimited migrations should their business needs change. In the case of Acumatica, data always remains the property of the customer.
2. What are the main business cloud challenges? Dedenis: Every business is different and so cloud requirements will vary, but there is always the right cloud deployment for every company. When it comes to reaping the benefits of cloud-based ERP and big data storage, the requirements stated above of flexibility of deployment in any cloud and with any vendor of choice is critical to ensuring a cloud ERP that is future-proof. Businesses are building and procuring for the future, not just for today's requirements. That's the key challenge in changing mindsets.
3. Now tell us about the opportunities...Dedenis: On a true cloud platform that enables users to reap the benefits of cloud, you'll have a consumption- or utility-based pricing model. That is the true promise of cloud - the opportunity to scale to unlimited users in the organisation. This is possible at minimal or controlled cost if the cloud ERP vendor deploys a cloud-based utility or consumption model, where users only pay for what they are using. This is a game changer for many medium-sized organisations, as the traditional ERP vendors usually price per user or on 'group number of users' type licensing. The best part is the ability to involve everyone, on any device, anywhere.
4. Lastly, what's the difference between the public, private and hybrid cloud, and what's the benefit of each? Dedenis: Public cloud refers to a set of pooled server resources with multiple tenants sharing for compute or applications hosted in a third-party vendors' data centres. Think of it as a block of apartments, where multiple tenants can occupy the block; however each tenant has a unique key and can only access their own authorised apartment. Examples of such vendors include Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Rackspace or IBM-Softlayer. There are also a variety of local vendors who provide such offerings. Public cloud is an entirely safe, secure choice of hosting as reputable vendors deploy stringent global standards to ensure data security, data sovereignty and even redundancy or fail-overs in case of natural disasters or power outages. Often these are more secure than organisations hosting their own servers due to increased chances of human error or physical disasters on the premises that the servers occupy.
Private cloud is similar to public cloud in that the server resources are hosted off site in a third-party data centre. However, the main difference is that the server is single tenanted here - not shared beyond a single organisation.
The hybrid cloud has many varied definitions. However, a rule of thumb refers to a cloud architecture where the organisation owns the management server as a 'private' cloud, hosted on a specific premise. It can be outsourced to a third-party vendor or, if the organisation has sufficient resources, it can host it within their preferred premise. At the same time, this private management server administers or manages the access and resources to a group of multi-tenanted/public cloud resources. This set up is usually seen in larger, geographically disperse operations or operations with heavier compute workloads.
Seems there's a business cloud solution for any company. For more on the mobile business cloud, click here.
