Cloud

Clouds are hardware-based services offering compute, network and storage capacity where: hardware management is highly abstracted from users; users incur infrastructure costs as variable operating expenses, and infrastructure capacity is highly elastic. There are many enabling technologies for a cloud platform including: virtual machines, virtual storage and web services. Clouds may be private, public or a hybrid of both public and private.

For many, the business model of the cloud allows organizations to:

• Cut costs and implement green initiatives
• Eliminate large upfront expenses for new hardware and software
• Employ disaster recovery and business continuity  policies company-wide
• Eliminate the additional resources, burden and cost associated with ongoing system management

Some possible use cases for the cloud:

• Initial use for backup and disaster protection
• Initial use for purchase of SaaS
• Move some less critical applications and data to a combination of public and private cloud
• Longer term- move more critical applications to private cloud

Contact Broadleaf to get a better understanding of use of the cloud and what type of cloud strategy might make sense for your environment.