The adoption of cloud computing is increasingly gaining popularity among many businesses worldwide due to the numerous benefits experienced including improved performance, streamlined processes, and of course flexible and cost effective infrastructure. For companies to successfully achieve this, they must determine the best suited hosting solution for their needs: private cloud, public cloud or hybrid cloud. The following is a detailed comparison of the three main cloud hosting approaches.
The Difference Between Public Cloud and Private Cloud
Different cloud types exist to leverage specific features within every model, drawing from shared resources and security strategies to changing provisioning and virtualization approaches for high-demand systems. Choosing the type of cloud to adopt should mainly be based on the overarching business goals and how IT fits to support and/or advance those same goals. This helps provide a guide on selecting one or many variations of cloud infrastructure deployment models.
Public Cloud
The infrastructure of a Public cloud is owned and managed by third-party providers that make resources such as processing power, storage and applications, accessible to users over the Internet. This typically implies that your company doesn’t incur hardware or maintenance costs, but there are support and management costs to think about both internal and to the cloud provider. It offers a perfect solution for small to medium sized businesses and those with fluctuating or temporary demands. The overall benefits of the public cloud include:
- Automated deployments: businesses benefit from the increased speed in deploying IT resources, and the utility billing that public clouds offer.
- Scalability: As a flexible resource, businesses can scale up or down depending on the changing business demands, within a matter of minutes.
- Cost Savings: Managed public clouds distribute resources among several customer workloads, enabling each client to operate at a reduced cost by only paying for the resources consumed. A managed public cloud provider performs all the necessary maintenance meaning that enterprises don’t have to worry about data centre and hardware related maintenance expenses.
Private Cloud
A private cloud is a solely dedicated to your enterprise, hosted either internally or externally by a service provider data centre. The private cloud not only delivers all the agility, scalability and efficiency of the public cloud, but also offers the following benefits:
- Improved performance: Managed private cloud hosting provides highly secure environments and greater levels of control since it is designed around a single business’ particular requirements.
- Easily Customizable: private cloud offers easy customization of the compute, storage and networking components to best meet your application and security needs.
A private cloud is an ideal solution for mid-sized and large enterprises with strict data compliance and governance obligations. Your managed hosting provider can deliver more stringent SLAs and wrap around various security and network services to complement the solution along with a deeper level of service for routing requests and incidents.
The Hybrid Cloud
The hybrid cloud combines public cloud with a private cloud leveraging both clouds to develop a solution perfectly suited to your specific business requirements. It allows you to enjoy improved security from the private cloud as well as agility and scale benefits of the public cloud.
Implementing a hybrid cloud framework enables you to select the optimal workloads suited for either type of cloud. In addition, this approach is a cost-effective and efficient way to accommodate several use cases within an organization – development and testing sandboxes, disaster recovery, backups and hyperscale.
Keep in mind that hybrid clouds are only as strong as the integrations that link them. However, the shift towards a hybrid environment is not without its challenges as it demands a high level of expertise to maintain and manage the present and future needs. Adopting a hybrid cloud is a logical decision for businesses that intend to achieve great agility and optimize costs.