Over the last year or so, there has been a lot of publicity around cloud computing — both public and private. Most of the publicity seems to be centered around how businesses need to move away from their physical on-premises systems to a purely cloud-based architecture. However, that is not the case. Some functionality is better in an on-premises environment. The key to a successful architecture is knowing ahead of time where issues lie and addressing those potential issues upfront — before they become a service-impacting problem for you.
For instance, public cloud-based solutions are very flexible and allow administrators to spin applications up and down to match business needs. This helps to right-size costs. On the other hand, because of the architecture, IT personnel that have shifted their networks from a physical on-premises environment to a cloud environment have reported several unexpected performance problems, as well as cost savings that fall below original predictions.