So you’ve decided to take your business to the cloud? Congrats! This is going to allow you to accelerate and increase the scope of your business initiatives to unprecedented levels. Now, all you have to do is figure out what sort of configuration you want your cloud computing set-up to be. Unfortunately, the jargon that gets batted around the cloud computing world can be a little intimidating to say the least. In this post, I look at four types of cloud computing systems in what I can only hope is straightforward, easily understood, and appetite-whetting language.
Private Cloud
In Brief: You own the server pie. You control who gets to take slices from it. A single-tenant environment better geared to mid to large-sized companies that need to meet compliance and security requirements.
Payment: It’s more expensive to buy a pie than it is to pay for a sliver of one. You are paying for dedicated servers and so you are looking at a contract model of payment to keep that infrastructure up-and-running.
Performance: It’s your server pie, so you get to decide what ingredients go into it. You have the ability to control everything from hardware performance to storage performance. If needed, a dedicate server can be integrated into the system for hybrid cloud capabilities. More on that below.
Compliance: You control your pie and whoever gets a share of it. Unlike a public cloud where your data is hosted in the same data center, private cloud solutions are hosted with their own data storage, hardware, and network. For that reason, high security and compliance requirements like Sarbanes Oxley, PCI and HIPPA can be much more easily met.
Public Cloud
In Brief: Someone else owns the the server pie e.g. Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud, or Microsoft Azure. You pay them to take a slice of their pie. A multi-tenant environment often used for smaller development systems or web servers that are not as focused on compliance.
Payment: Many public clouds operate off of a pay-as-you-go model, which often translates into hourly rates for using specific resources. Contracts requiring ongoing use are seldom part of the equation.
Performance: You are taking a slice of someone else’s server pie, and so you don’t have any control over what ingredients go into that pie. The hardware on which your server will be hosted is decided for you.
Compliance: In a public cloud, you are taking a slice of pie that other individuals/companies/clients are taking slices of. Because you are sharing hardware, storage and more with these other entities, meeting compliance standards such as PCI or SOX is often not possible.
via thedatavault.com
Hybrid Cloud
In Brief: You are eating from two pies. A strategy in which two types of cloud or hosting infrastructure are used by a single company. Using different clouds for the same task.
Payment: Depends on the marriage of server pies. May end up being a combination of the pay-as-you-go and contract model. Increased flexibility means a better chance of getting the best price per performance.
Performance: Can be Public/Private to maximize power while also maximizing security, dedicated/non-dedicated for customized performance, colocation for redundancy for stability and redundancy needs.
Compliance: Depends on the marriage of server pies
Multi-Cloud
In Brief: Taking pieces from multiple pies in multiple locations. As cloud technology advances, certain clouds will emerge as being better at accomplishing different tasks e.g. sharing sensitive data or processing power. Using different clouds for different tasks. A hybrid cloud can use a multi-cloud.
Payment: Depends on the network of server pies. May end up being a combination of the pay-as-you-go and contract model. Increased flexibility means a better chance of getting the best price per performance.
Performance: Inherently is a diverse array of server pies, which means that you should be seeing better performance.
Compliance: Can be public or or private, depending on what sort of server pies you own and what sort of server pies you’ll need to access elsewhere. Depending on how your cloud network is configured, this can be arranged to easily meet compliance and security requirements.
In today’s world of cloud computing, we’re seeing a push to diversified cloud systems. Being able to navigate between the types of cloud systems out there will without a doubt be essential for many businesses to maintain competitiveness moving forward.