Blog

In the late 90s some of the bigger companies started to look at the IT systems they had in place, and began to deliberate if they were strictly essential to their operation. Did they really need a data storage centre? While a few courageous firms around the Sunderland and North-East areas, as well as the rest of the UK, started to contract out some of their gear, most decided that yes they did indeed require a data storage centre.

The calculation was unassuming: either select a speedy internal system constructed on a corporate data storage centre, where costs decreased as the data centre scaled up, or contract out to a third-party at approximately the same cost. Nevertheless you’d still need your IT teams, it wouldn’t scale, and you have to include in cost of a very costly data connection.

Then came VMware, an excess of fibre from the dotcom crash and the logistics transformed forever. Virtualisation was the spur for the change; it permitted managed cloud storage hosting on a scale that was thought to be impossible, at a rate that made it the obvious choice. Plus the obtainability of cheap fibre from the dotcom bubble roll-out meant the blanket wholesale cost of data traffic crumpled.

The equation was now unbalanced, data centres were costly, and cloud hosting and storage was seen as cheap and economical. Industries virtualised all of their servers and soon their data-halls full of individual server racks turned into a scare amount of blade racks in a cabinet, which could work just as well if they were in Sunderland or Silicon Valley, it made no difference.

Steadily businesses relocated their servers and data storage to outsourced hosts such as us, and started to pull back their IT teams to only a few individuals, overseeing a few storage hosting interactions and the leftovers of the storage servers they couldn’t virtualise. After that, as the working years of expertise in maintaining IT systems vanished, businesses went one step more and progressively moved from remote hosting to remote managed hosting, which is the stage at which we are now currently at as an industry.

Public cloud storage providers offer a specific solution with set functions which are built on a public platform shared by all of its users. Examples of this are Office 365, Xero Accounting, Dropbox and Amazon.

Private Cloud providers create a dedicated solution which can be used and configured to fit completely round the business needs. Whilst the solution may sit on shared hardware, the private cloud network is totally isolated and protected from other service users.

Hybrid Cloud is typically a mix of public cloud solutions, on premise systems and private cloud. Most businesses already use some cloud based services alongside their on premise systems even though they may not consider this to be a hybrid.

If you are interested in finding out more about cloud technologies in the Sunderland area and how they can be used, take a look at our case studies on the relevant page.