Best of both worlds
Salesforce subsidiary Mulesoft Inc., a software company that develops integration software for connecting applications, data and devices, stated recently that they “give you the best of both worlds in that you’re still running your applications behind your firewall, but the resources are still owned, operated and maintained by a VPC vendor.
“You don’t need to acquire and run all the hardware and server space to set up a private cloud; a multi-tenant cloud provider will do all of that for you – but you will still have the security benefits of a private cloud.”
“A VPC allows you to virtually create a private and isolated network in the cloud. Just as a virtual private network provides secure data transfer over the public internet, a VPC provides secure data transfer between a private enterprise and a public cloud provider.
Why would an organization choose to go this route? The answer is multi-faceted. First, armed with a dedicated server and knowing that 100 percent of that particular environment is its own; it now has its own personal pool of dedicated hardware to run an assortment of applications that can be sliced and diced in any shape or form. And because it is not a shared environment, the amount of performance needed is guaranteed.
Your organization may also have certain compliance and security requirements that you need to meet, which means that you cannot have applications from someone else physically running in or on the same infrastructure.
In a dedicated private cloud nobody else’s application is sharing or co-owning that same memory space, which is a key advantage.
The piece of hardware is dedicated to you, you get to run whatever applications you want on it and it reduces any security risks should a problem arise, which was the case last year with the Meltdown and Spectre hardware vulnerability fiasco which potentially allowed any malicious program running in a shared environment to access items running in memory from other users.
Tying all the pieces together
When it comes to a VPC, there are a number of key points that that organizations need to consider: The overall flexibility of the infrastructure, the level of agility, the ability to secure the data, and last, but not least, the connectivity that ties all those pieces together.
Quality is also everybody’s responsibility. We’re talking about the quality of your applications whether you are the coder, or responsible for documentation or the QA tester -- everyone must play a part.
You can extend that argument out further in that everyone should also plays a role in the security aspect of the application as well regardless of whether you are responsible for designing the storage infrastructure where the private information of your users is going to be installed, designing the active control systems, or creating the application itself.
Vendors and suppliers of parts of your infrastructure become an extension of that same adage. That’s why with an organization like Aptum you can have an agnostic and elevated discussion about:
- What are you looking to achieve?
- What hypervisor do you want installed?
- What kind of performance are you looking for?
Finally, what are the security and compliance requirements that you will need to meet in order for your application workload to be successful, which jurisdictions are you running in and how does the data stay private, while it is in in transit?
Connectivity is key
All of those aspects need to be part of the conversation when discussing the virtual private cloud. There may be opportunities where your workload is extremely predictable and as a result, the dedicated virtual private cloud may be much less expensive than moving it to a hyperscale environment
Without the connectivity piece, your virtual private cloud is literally sitting on an island doing nothing for you. You need to connect to it in order to take advantage of an environment. Connectivity is a major cornerstone when designing these solutions. It sometimes is as an afterthought, but it really does need to be brought into the forefront of the discussion.
