How Cloud Data Centers Compare to Traditional Data Centers

By Judith Hurwitz, Robin Bloor, Marcia Kaufman, and Fern Halper from Cloud Computing For Dummies

Before making any decisions about moving your data center to a cloud, you need to take the time to consider how cloud data centers compare to traditional data centers. Because of the high costs of infrastructure and administration, data centers are often one of the first business areas that companies consider switching to a cloud service.

If you’re tasked with planning your cloud strategy, how do you do what’s best for your organization? The first step is to simply find a cloud services provider, analyze how much it charges for the services you need, and compare it to the costs of your own data center. However, it is important to remember that it's unlikely that you'll find a single cloud service that does everything you're doing in your data center.

Ultimately, cloud services are attractive because the cost is likely to be far lower than providing the same service from your traditional data center.

Traditional Corporate Data Center	Cloud Data Center
Thousands of different applications	Few applications (maybe even just one)
Mixed hardware environment	Homogeneous hardware environment
Multiple management tools	Standardized management tools
Frequent application patching and updating	Minimal application patching and updating
Complex workloads	Simple workloads
Multiple software architectures	Single standard software architecture

Looking at the table, it becomes clear that the cloud data center is much simpler to organize and operate and, because it is simple, it scales well. In other words, the larger you make it, the lower the costs per user are.