What is a Cloud Data Center?

Comparing On-Premises and Cloud Data Centers

Cloud data centers differ from on-premises data centers in a variety of ways. Here we’ll be taking a look at each. 

• In traditional data centers, resource scalability is limited by the amount of physical hardware available for deployment. Having your own infrastructure to maintain and administer takes significant financial and human input. In contrast, with cloud data centers, additional resources can be added as needed without the costs of purchasing equipment. You can buy more storage whenever you are ready or reduce it when development slows.
• In on-premises data centers, flexibility is limited by appliances that may need to be acquired, provisioned, or updated. At the same time, businesses can choose exactly what software and hardware they want, allowing for changes to be made whenever the organization decides. In the cloud, organizations are limited to what the service provider offers and what works on their platform. 
• On-premises traditional data centers have a higher cost than their cloud counterpart. Paying full price for infrastructure, including various server and networking hardware and personnel for maintenance, adds up. Replacing hardware as it gets outdated with staff makes it even more expensive. Hosting your data on a cloud data center results in more savings by eliminating various factors for maintenance, allowing for better resource optimization.
• In the cloud, uptime availability is promised by service level agreements, which can provide better guarantees than an organization may be able to in-house. Users can access the cloud if there is a stable internet connection. In on-premises setup, natural disasters, blackouts, and other unexpected events may compromise uptime availability. 
• In the cloud, everything is available as a code. This allows organizations to fully automate the entire lifecycle of infrastructure without ever touching any components of physical infrastructure. This essentially enables organizations to scale up and scale down resources on-demand, allowing for faster turnaround time while optimizing costs and use of resources.

As we’ve described, cloud data centers have a variety of advantages over their traditional counterparts. However, if an on-premises data center is required by a company for any reason, there is also a solution. Migrating to a cloud data center does not necessarily mean moving everything to the cloud. Many companies also utilize a hybrid approach, where a mix of traditional data center components is used with elements of a cloud data center through a shared responsibility model. Depending on the specifics of the approach, an organization can be responsible for maintaining and securing more or less of its infrastructure stack—fitting it exactly to its needs.