Cloud

How Should SMBs Use the Public Cloud?

Start with backup and disaster recovery and go from there.

Justin Zeeb is a public cloud specialist at CDW.

When small businesses think of the public cloud, they should see it as a flexible, cost-effective way to access enterprise-level IT infrastructure without the need for heavy upfront investments. The public cloud offers on-demand computing power, scalable storage and managed services, so that SMBs only pay only for what they use.

If you’re an SMB asking, “What should I put in the public cloud?” the answer is to start with backup and disaster recovery (DR). You can’t go wrong investing in security. These two essential components of cyber resilience will help any business regardless of its IT budget.

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Start with Your Backups

Mutable backup should live in the cloud. Whether you have a Veeam solution or Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services, have your backups live there. This also gives IT leaders full transparency into what they have, which is what 80% of our SMB customers need. (Immutable backups are completely isolated from the environment, so you don’t have to worry about them.)

Build Out a Disaster Recovery Solution

After your backups are in the public cloud, the next step is to ask, “What is the organization’s tolerance for an outage?” For some organizations, being down for three or four days is not a big deal. For others, three days down is three days of income lost. That’s where you need to start to build out a DR solution. If operations stop, the public cloud will serve as your failover environment to stay up and running.

Let’s say you’ve got 25 virtual machines that are mission-critical. These must be running for you to stay open. So, you build out those 25 VMs inside of, say, Azure. In the event that your business goes offline, you failover to Azure, and those VMs light up immediately. Sure, it’s going to be pricey because you’re paying for the compute, but it far outweighs the cost of lost revenue during that period.

Make Sure Your Disaster Recovery Plan Works

CDW can help SMBs identify these mission-critical assets and build out tailor-made disaster recovery plans. We help create a playbook or “runbook” of what to do in an emergency, and we also go through the environment to test that all of these failover points work. We then practice it with our customers so they know all of the steps to take in an emergency. We also run several assessments — a technical readiness assessment and a cybersecurity assessment — to evaluate the environment more deeply.

Why Public Cloud Is Your Best Insurance Policy for Outages

Here’s an example of why the public cloud works well for backup and disaster recovery. We had a customer at CDW that handles data analytics for chambers of commerce across the United States. Every city has a chamber of commerce, and that’s its client base. it hosts all of their data.

The main chamber of commerce data company is located in Minneapolis. Its failover site is in St. Paul, Minn. That’s not very far away, but it snows a lot, and there can be weather-related power outages. If Minneapolis and St. Paul’s data centers go offline, the city of Austin, Texas, is not going to care about the snow. But so long as the chambers use the public cloud, that data isn’t going offline. It’s backed up and safe.

EXPLORE: How to navigate cybersecurity compliance in financial services.

How To Choose the Right Public Cloud Solution

AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) are all good public cloud solutions, and the differences among them are marginal. Right now, AWS is the market leader in small businesses. It offers a wide range of third-party integrations and has the most flexibility when it comes to pay-as-you-go models. Its hybrid cloud solution, AWS Outpost, enables teams to run AWS services in their own data centers while maintaining seamless integration with the AWS public cloud.

That said, the price of entry is lower for Azure (Microsoft is lowering it to roughly $5,000), which may make it more attractive to an SMB. If having some data on-prem and being able to see its servers is important to a SMB, Azure has a wide variety of hybrid cloud setups that work well.

GCP is probably the strongest in AI, machine learning and data analytics, with a developer-friendly approach. It has Big Data processing, high-speed networking and Kubernetes, which is ideal for containerized workloads. If your SMB specializes in that area, then go with GCP.

READ OUR Q&A: Why cloud security is hard to manage.

Dispelling a Myth About the Public Cloud

There’s a common myth that public cloud is a catch-all lift-and-shift solution. I want to dispel that myth. It’s ideally used for backup and DR, so start there. If your teams decide to use it further, be intentional about it. For most SMBs, a hybrid model makes sense overall, so don’t think of public cloud as excluding you from taking advantage of on-prem or private cloud. With this mindset, you will be more successful.

This article is part of BizTech's AgilITy blog series.