Does Your Business Need a Virtual Datacenter? 4 Important Questions to Ask

Virtual datacenters (VDCs) offer businesses all the resources of a physical datacenter along with added scalability and cost efficiency. Rather than having to purchase servers, storage, and networking components, a VDC lets you seamlessly integrate your existing IT infrastructure with a virtual solution where your resources run safely and securely in a hyper-scale public cloud environment such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services (AWS). When you utilize and connect your on-premises datacenters with a public cloud, you create a “hybrid cloud” environment.

While a virtual datacenter can improve your data’s security and accessibility, you should ask yourself the following questions before you transition to a virtual solution

1. Do You Need a Comprehensive Disaster Recovery Solution?

At Stratus Innovations, we believe that every business should have an IT disaster plan that protects irreplaceable and sensitive data. Physical backup systems can and do fail. However, having a virtual datacenter opens the door for disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS).

When you move your data and applications to the cloud, you no longer have to rely on a single physical datacenter or deal with the costs of running and upgrading a physical or co-location datacenter. If a natural or humanmade disaster occurs, your business’ data and IT systems remain safely stored on the cloud and easily accessible. For example, our DRaaS solution can complete a full failover in as little as five minutes, allowing your business’ IT systems to stay up and running through even the worst-case scenarios.

2. Do You Need to Expand, Upgrade, or Replace Your Existing Datacenter?

If your datacenter needs are changing or you are considering upgrades to your existing server and storage hardware environment, you may want to move some or all of your IT infrastructure to the cloud. Transitioning to a cloud might eliminate the massive up-front operational expense (OPEX) involved with this hardware upgrade. Compared to traditional datacenters, VDCs are usually more cost-effective, and they offer faster hardware provisioning, increased security, and more data mobility.

With a physical datacenter, hardware costs take up a large portion of your budget. When you implement a virtual datacenter, you significantly reduce your hardware needs. And no matter how carefully you plan when implementing any datacenter, your IT needs will change over time, which means you’ll need to reprovision your hardware and network resources. A virtual datacenter lets you make these changes quickly and easily.

Finally, you can use a virtual datacenter to isolate your business’ data within a public cloud, making it much more secure. On a public cloud, you normally share resources with other tenants, which can impact your data’s security. A virtual datacenter can impose boundaries around your data and add supplemental layers of encryption and identity management.

3. Are You Running Legacy Applications?

Today’s cloud solutions are not a good fit for some vertically-scaled legacy applications. Many of these applications rely on large database layers that must be readily available for the app to work properly. It can be incredibly difficult to deploy these databases to multiple servers. Fortunately, a virtual datacenter can facilitate the transition to the cloud.

You may be able to “lift and shift” your legacy applications using infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). Along with increased access, transitioning your legacy software to a VDC can protect vital and impossible-to-replace data.

For example, suppose your company relies on a database solution that is no longer supported. If you store your data on a physical server that becomes corrupted, you might lose that data forever.

If you’re struggling to transition your cumbersome legacy applications to the cloud, you may want to consider new cloud-based apps that can replace them. While you search for a forward-looking solution, storing your legacy apps on the cloud can give you peace of mind and security.

4. Do You Need to Test Software or Operating System Updates?

For many businesses, IT testing is vital to their operations. However, IT sandbox environments rarely work well with in-house datacenter resources. Sandbox workloads often involve shifting capacity needs, and they require quick responses to changes along with intensive IT support. None of these elements are particularly compatible with traditional physical datacenters.

Whether you’re making upgrades to software and operating systems, performing security assessments and training sessions, or going through pre-production testing, a virtual sandbox environment provides a space where you can safely implement updates and experiment with new systems without worrying about the constraints of a physical datacenter.

Scale Up Your Business’ Network With the Virtual Datacenter Offering From Stratus Innovations Group

At Stratus Innovations Group, we develop and implement virtual datacenters and other customized cloud-based solutions for businesses of all shapes and sizes. To find out how a virtual datacenter can help meet your business’ unique needs, contact us today. Just call us at 844-561-6721 or fill out our online contact form and someone from our team will help.

Posted in Virtual Data Centers and tagged cloud solutions, disaster recovery, Stratus Innovations