Customer Premised Cloud

By Nick Hortovanyi

It would seem a number of organisations perceive the need to be able to audit their physical infrastructure. Whilst end users, within those organisations, in general are not overly concerned where the service is physically located. As long as that services enables them to perform the activities that they are required to do within what could be considered reasonable constraints.

One would assume that this driving factor is coming more so from non-IT related areas of the business. Yet, I do get the feeling that the traditional IT department is reluctant to release some authority to others. Maybe this has something to do also with our need to associate tangible wealth with physical objects. At the end of day Gold is still Gold.

I've had some interesting discussion over the last couple of months where we have started to ascertain the pros and cons of extending a cloud for a solution to be partially located on-premise. This could be achieved through propogating a VM instance to run with the customer's on-premise environment. The VM would be secure and maintained remotely, as it would just appear as another node.

The two main advantages appear to be that it gives the Auditors the ability to tick a box on an Audit to say here is that system and also the ability to be able to access local data that may be required for other systems and/or is of a sensitive nature.

However, the additional costs to not only develop, but support this type of  environment, on first glance, would overcome the inherent cost saving from a multi-tenant environment. But, at first glance again, does appear to have lower costs then the traditional on-premise delivery channels.

So a Customer Premised Cloud may be an interim step towards a fully off-premise multi-tenant solution.

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