You have decided to use the cloud. A wise move! You are joining the 90% of enterprises that, according to IDC, will use multiple cloud services and platforms by 2020. We are already seeing the transition with 451 Research predicting that 60% of IT workloads will run in the cloud by 2019.

Making the jump to the cloud isn’t straightforward though. Just like any purchase, a move to the cloud should be considered with the same level of due diligence as any other significant investment.

So do you go public, private or hybrid? And what about single tenancy and multi-tenancy?

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The majority of businesses are now familiar with the differences between the public and private cloud, yet fewer understand what’s meant by single tenancy and multi-tenancy cloud. The reality is they are quite similar, and the net result is largely the same.

Many public cloud offerings are multi-tenant, meaning that multiple customers share one instance of software. While shared, multi-tenant offerings are set up to prevent users from accessing each other’s information. Customers benefit from regular and automatic updates and upgrades as well as high levels of security. The downside with multi-tenancy is that it often offers limited configuration and limited application interoperability.

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Single tenant cloud offerings are one instance of the application to one customer and typically on a private cloud environment. This means there is much greater flexibility with regards to both the application and environment – they can both be tailored to meet specific customer needs.

Multi-tenancy is like a bus journey. The bus is shared with others to bring down the cost of the overall journey, and the route of the bus is pre-determined which means there is little to no scope to change this. Single tenant, on the other hand, is more akin to a taxi. It’s used only by one customer and the route of the taxi can be set (and changed) according to the customer’s needs. This can cost more than the bus journey, but the flexibility is there.

Ultimately though, it’s about sharing and, when investing in the cloud, it’s critical that businesses decide whether they will be comfortable with sharing and having limited scope to deviate from the application’s capability, or whether they want the flexibility and choice available with a single tenant environment.

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What’s also important is recognising that a business doesn’t use one piece of software for its digital needs – it uses several so all of them should ideally be hosted together in one cloud, or have the ability to communicate between each other to serve the needs of the business.

So before you eagerly sign up for a cloud service, make sure you check the type of cloud and whether it really suits your business needs. After all, you won’t want to get caught out in a storm.

Sourced by Dean McGlone, Sales Director at V1