TheMReport — News and strategies for the evolving mortgage marketplace.
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30 | Th e M Rep o RT Feature from regulators and the need to keep property information secure, while better controlling costs, the best way field services companies can serve their mortgage servic- ing clients is by adopting a hybrid cloud infrastructure strategy. Making It Public F or several years, IT profes- sionals and businesses have debated the best way to utilize cloud computing within their organization. Those in favor of the public cloud offerings cite the cost savings of predictable operating expenditures over variable capital expenditures. Public cloud advocates also enjoy the known cost structures for scaling their environments to address usage, speed, and increased data capacity needs. Public cloud offerings tend to be less expensive and easier for businesses to rapidly implement, while avoiding the capital costs of purchasing and maintaining data centers and physical hardware. Public cloud infrastructures are billed on a consumption model, representing the end user client's use of storage, central processing unit (CPU), memory, bandwidth, and level of redundancy. As additional services or technical resources are consumed, monthly operating expenditures will increase. Public cloud environments also provide great benefits to organizations beyond capital cost avoidance, which include automa- tion, scalability, rapid deployment models, and decreasing staff needs. Public cloud clients are able to build systems and com- plete environments in minutes with the automation tools built into the public cloud offerings. Many public cloud clients also are building elasticity into their environments, allowing them to auto-provision and scale up to meet the demands of their users, then dynamically de-provision systems during lower utilization periods to further optimize oper- ating costs. With the cloud provi- sioning and automation toolsets, public cloud clients require less IT administrative staff, lowering their staffing expenditures and shifting their existing staff toward more engineering focuses. Because public cloud computing runs on shared hardware, con- sumed by many different clients, security concerns may be an issue for financial clients running their mission critical applications and storing their protected data in a shared public cloud environment. Other areas of concern with public cloud offerings include the accessibility of retrieving data or moving data between providers, linear growth in operating costs, and the auditability of public cloud environments. Private Eyes M any IT organizations are implementing private cloud environments, which leverage the public cloud technologies like virtualiza- tion, automation, and enhanced monitoring within their physical or co-located data center envi- ronments. IT organizations that prefer private cloud computing prefer the agility, automation, scalability, and redundancy of public cloud offerings, mixed with the management, security, and control frameworks built within their own data center environments. The private cloud is developed and implemented to support a single organization—whether managed internally or by a third party—and hosted within internal data centers or co-located environments. Highly sensitive and confidential data can be stored securely in a private cloud offering, with the IT organization maintaining total control of the security and audit components. IT organizations also have greater flexibility and options for manag- ing access to their environments in a private cloud offering. Private clouds maintain higher costs than public cloud offerings due to the need for both capital and operating expenditures related to the maintenance and support of the data center environments, physical hardware, software, and the cloud framework tools. However, the increase in costs is offset by the total control an IT organization can maintain with relation to security, audit/compli- ance, technical capabilities, and data access. Best of Both Worlds A hybrid cloud combines both public and private cloud services that companies are leveraging into a comprehen- sive solution to solve business problems. While being separate entities, many organizations are combining public cloud ser- vices for scalability and agility in their infrastructures, while maintaining private cloud offer- ings for security and control of their protected data. Fields services organizations "For several years, IT professionals and businesses have debated the best way to utilize cloud computing within their organization. Those in favor of the public cloud offerings cite the cost savings of predictable operating expenditures over variable capital expenditures."