Tech Lover 9

Now the big decision becomes: public or private cloud?  With a private cloud, the infrastructure is set up exclusively for one organization. It can be managed on the site of the organization. This is sometimes called an enterprise cloud. However, it can also be hosted offsite and managed by a service provider, either as hosted or managed cloud.

On the other hand, there is the public cloud. This type of infrastructure has many different tenants (multitenant) and is perhaps most suitable for SMEs or the public at large. A business that sells this type of computing service will still be regarded as having ownership of the resources.
Before deciding on one type or another, some questions have to be asked.
The first is what type of security is necessary for the company in general. For firms that do specialized research and development or work for the government, a high level of security has to be inherent in the cloud. Although public clouds are becoming more secure, private ones meet the strictest standards. Additional measures can also be added to strengthen the system if necessary.

For a growing business, there is also the issue of scalability. A private cloud has a more restricted dynamic scalability potential, especially if the cloud is at the company premises. Expansion means an additional server would be needed if a business requires more computing power. Public clouds on the other hand already share common resources and are more scalable.  Adding resources is completely the responsibility of the service provider to maintain an acceptable service level.

Another decision aspect involves the virtualization knowledge. Some companies have attempted to form a private cloud, but don’t have the required experience or expertise. It is important to have capable staff on hand to answer any questions and take care of problems that will arise when trying to create a private cloud for companywide usage.

One more important point regards the type of applications that should be run on a private cloud. Most of the time, these are large enterprise programs. Systems with huge databases are perfect candidates for private cloud usage. The expense has to be weighed against the cost of data, files and emails however.

Finally, what are the budgetary constraints? Establishing and maintaining a private clouds typically cost a great deal more than deploying public cloud services. A public cloud, while multi-tenant in nature, can offer most of the same features as the private one at a substantial discount, except for some advanced security features and, sometimes, network latency. With increasingly better networking capacity, content delivery networks and edge-locations as well as providing closed networking access to cloud data centers, this drawback is diminishing. Cloud computing, including private and public clouds, is clearly here to stay and is developing fast. The mobile cloud, wireless internet and smartphones further help to increase its adoption rate in every aspect.