Lets first look at what is Cloud Computing.  So if someone asked me what is the cloud?

If you took out all your "IT Stuff" and put it into a car and drove it to your local DataCentre than it would be in the Cloud.  You no longer have I.T equipment on-site so therefore it is "in the Cloud"

So lets take a look a building a cloud presence yourself vs the traditional model.

The Traditional Model.

So firstly you have to pick a DataCentre, Ireland is a great place to build DataCentres because there are no natural hazards, major flooding, earthquakes, etc, it also has a temperate climate, it doesn't get too hot or too cold.

DataCentres needs to have a lot of security, raised floor, air con units, bio metrics, 24*7 access, you purchase your rack space inside the DataCentre cabinets which blows all the hot air from the back and sucks all the hot air from the front, pay a monthly charge just for the rack.

You pay for the rack to put your equipment but your equipment is no use unless  purchase your internet connectivity, most DataCentres will have multiple carriers  example B.T, and Vodafone so if one ISP goes offline then there is redundancy built in throughout…

Now you have to install your equipment, you go buy a bunch of switches, firewalls, cabling, power supplies, servers, webservers, app servers, Storage Area Network (fast pricey storage), all this costs massive amount of money.  This can take months for you to gather all this equipment and have it shipped out to you,

So you need to configure your services, what I.T services do you need to provide for the clients, Is it going to be a webserver? do you want customers to come to you?

The Datacentres also have very high SLA 99 % promised, but if you really want redundancy you will want more assurance than you will have to move over to another Datacentre, companies don’t want their whole performance based on one D.C

Another reason companies want to have multiple DataCentres is for speed of access,

So if you have website selling products in Australia than you would need to open a DC in Oz as the connection will be much quicker there.

When you look at all the above you can see how much work this involves, lets compare this to AWS

First thing with Amazon Web Services, there is no equipment involved, we are not going to buy all the servers, firewalls, switches, as AWS provide them all for us.

These are regions of the world where Amazon owns Datacentres, so if you are in Ireland than we will go to the eu-west-1 region, our Irish customers can access the websites quicker in the closest possible datacentre to them.  Example if Bob from Ballymun wants to access your website than he will be can bent to the closes region to him (Ireland).