Moving to the cloud?

hargi · 14 May 2015 at 22:30

I don't know if this is the right place or not.
But has anyone moved there network over to the cloud? I have been asked to look at replacing an entire network. I have started looking at kit but then someone mentioned the cloud and AWS, Google and Azure etc and that could be a possibility.
Basically its just going to be Server 2012R2 as a DC for 1000 profiles however we only have 150 clients and that would be at peak times im guessing 50 to 80 at most times. And a large amount of data storage. all/most software will be installed on the clients with maybe one or two small programs run off the server.

Has anyone done this? is it possible? is it cost effective? is there any massive downsides to it other then if the internet connection goes down on site?

Cheers

gman1981 · 15 May 2015 at 06:48

I would seriously look at the bandwidth requirements for the file server part of the server. Don't move to the public cloud unless you are sure the Internet bandwidth can cope with the demands, otherwise you will just have unhappy users.

PooKer · 15 May 2015 at 08:37

Multiple internet connections that come in the building via different routes so you know if one goes down the business can still function. EG BT business fibre and Virgin media business fibre for example are a must if you go cloud.
Personally I'd rather use the cloud for off site backups only at this stage and still keep it locally purely for the users access speed. While it may appear cost effective to start with compared to buying everything outright. just add up how much it will cost (assuming prices do not increase for the cloud services). You may find over 5 years cloud works out higher. And then comes the old how much faith do you put in other people to look after your data?

lumencreative · 18 May 2015 at 10:10

I had a play around with a trial of Microsoft Azure last week and while I was impressed with the service in general, I was actually quite shocked at how expensive it works out to be when you add everything together, especially if, as Pooker said, you work it out over 5 years or so.

My advice would be to stick to on premise stuff for the day to day running of the business, maybe look at Office365 Hosted Exchange for email, and consider some sort of offsite backup (we're a small company so we just use an offsite NAS for our offsite backup but there are plenty of disaster recovery providers out there).

Caged · 19 May 2015 at 00:18

AWS and Azure are not replacements for an on-premise VMware (or similar) cluster - they are platforms designed to run cloud-aware workloads which are able to take advantage of the scalability of the platform and which can cope with a node failing and needing to be redeployed.

If you want to put an HA domain controller somewhere that isn't an on-premise datacentre then look at Rackspace.

jfish · 20 May 2015 at 14:31

We are moving a lot of servers and services into Azure and at the moment we have a VPN to Azure from our LAN - which is causing issues with performance. We will be moving to a dedicated provider called ExpressRoute within the new few months.