Many businesses today view cloud deployment as a critical decision for the overall health of a company.
In our earlier e-book, we captured some of the concerns that CIO’s face when deciding what applications and workloads to move to the cloud. Some being – the industry your organization is in, regulatory concerns, type of clients you cater to and the overall benefits you want your business to achieve with the deployed cloud solutions.
Even though the overall benefits of cloud computing services have proven to be very valuable, before deciding to pursue a cloud strategy, it is critical to establish which type of cloud would be best for your business: a public cloud, a private cloud or a hybrid cloud.
The Public Cloud:
In a public cloud, the cloud infrastructure is located in one or more external datacenters, owned by a service provider and shared by multiple customers. Since the infrastructure is very large, public clouds provide practically unlimited scalability on demand.
Generally, public cloud service providers like Amazon AWS, Microsoft and Google own and operate the infrastructure and offer access only via Internet (direct connectivity is not offered).
Key Benefits:
- Limited up-front capital costs as you only pay for the resources that your organization consumes, on a monthly basis.
- Scale on demand as and when your business needs it.
- Benefit from the economies of scale of a shared infrastructure and the expertise of a specialist employed by the service provider.
Major Drawbacks:
The infrastructure is shared between customers, which triggers concerns from a security point of view. Although this drawback is managed considerably by partnering with a reliable service provider.
The Private Cloud:
Private cloud infrastructure service on the other hand is used exclusively by a single organization. In most cases, the infrastructure is also owned by the organization and can be located and managed in a corporate data center or an external datacenter.
Private clouds are ideal when you need to accelerate innovation, have large compute and storage requirements, or have very strict control, security, and compliance needs.
Key Benefits:
A private cloud overcomes the problems of security and regulatory compliance associated with public cloud deployments and also enables you to run any applications you want at a cost.
Major Drawbacks:
Owning and managing your own cloud infrastructure means that you will incur up-front capital costs while building the private cloud. And while a private cloud can provide operational agility by enabling you to provision applications on demand and scale workloads rapidly, you won’t benefit from the virtually limitless instant scalability that a public cloud can provide.
As an organisation, it will be your responsibility to maintain suitable skilled IT staff and making arrangements for contingency planning in case of a disaster.
The Hybrid Cloud:
The hybrid cloud combines the private and public cloud. Data and applications can be moved from one cloud to another when necessary. For instance, workloads can be moved from a private to a public cloud to provide extra capacity during periods of high demand.
Hybrid models allow you to leverage the advantages of both public and private clouds by placing the more common, less regulated applications and services into the public cloud while keeping legacy, or performance sensitive applications in a private cloud. Several service providers offer this kind of functionality.
Many industry experts believe that the hybrid cloud model is the one that will emerge as the most popular in the long term, offering a combination of high levels of control and security, with access to virtually unlimited extra capacity on demand, paid for only when needed. You can take advantage of hybrid clouds to provide additional capacity during demand spikes, or to provide additional capacity for specific workloads for longer periods until it makes sense to purchase new equipment and implement it in-house.
For more on choosing the right cloud infrastructure or solution’s consultancy for your business, reach us at info@sysfore.com.