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Which approach will you take to adopting cloud computing?

  

  

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The first thing a business needs to consider as they look towards the cloud is which approach to the cloud they want to take. It may surprise some to learn that despite all the press and discussions around the cloud, there are only two classes of clouds: public clouds and private clouds. There are significant differences between the two classes and each has its own unique set of advantages and disadvantages.

Public clouds are cloud services provided by a third party (vendor). They exist beyond the company firewall, and they are fully hosted and managed by the cloud provider. Public clouds attempt to provide consumers with hassle-free IT elements. Whether it is software, application infrastructure, or physical infrastructure, the cloud provider takes on the responsibilities of installation, management, provisioning, and maintenance. Customers are only charged for the resources they use, so under-utilization is eliminated.

However, this comes at a cost. These services are usually offered with "convention over configuration," meaning that they are delivered with the idea of accommodating the most common use cases. Configuration options are usually a smaller subset than what they would be if the resource was controlled directly by the consumer. Another thing to keep in mind is that since consumers have little control over the infrastructure, processes requiring tight security and regulatory compliance are not always a good fit for public clouds.

Private clouds are cloud services provided within the enterprise. These clouds exist within the company firewall and they are managed by the enterprise. Private clouds have similar characteristics to that of public clouds with one major difference: the enterprise is in charge of setting up and maintaining the cloud. The difficulty and cost of establishing an internal cloud can sometimes be prohibitive, and the cost of continual operation of the cloud might exceed the cost of using a public cloud.

As the name suggests, private clouds are designed to be visible only to the organization that creates them. They are essentially private datacenters that an organization creates with stacks of servers all running virtual environments, providing a consolidated, efficient platform to run applications and store data. Private clouds provide a lot of the same benefits to the organization that a public cloud does, but still allows the organization to maintain ownership of the data and equipment.

However, where private clouds differ from public clouds is that private clouds can require a significant investment.

Hybrid clouds combine two or more clouds that remain unique entities but are bound together by technology that enables data and application portability.

A hybrid cloud blends the public and private cloud models. It assumes some level of interoperability between the two.

Due to the demand for the cloud to be more flexible and fully optimized, “hybrid clouds” will give companies an opportunity to pick which applications and IT services they want to provide and which they want to purchase from a cloud provider. These decisions will be based on costs, information risk and the functionality available from cloud providers on a workload-by-workload basis. In this model, your IT staff can keep internal control of data and processes, but you can also tap a public cloud for pay-as-you-go use of applications, computing power and scalable storage.  The hybrid cloud leverages services that are in both the public and private space. Hybrid clouds are the answer when a company needs to employ the services of both a public and private cloud. In this sense, a company can outline the goals and needs of services, and obtain them from the public or private cloud, as appropriate.

Once you understand the approach to the cloud you would like to take, you then decide on the types of services you would like to receive. In my next blog article we will look at the three services which make up cloud computing.