By Eric Vanderburg, Information security executive
The maturation of the cloud is fascinating as it continues to adapt, providing more opportunities for companies and consumers to leverage the vast computing and storage power of computers around the world. Whether those resources are housed in a corporate data center or dedicated hosting facility as part of private cloud services or through third party public cloud offerings, the cloud is most likely part of your everyday life and it is one of the biggest technology growth areas, offering companies ways to save money and become more adaptable to change.
There are many options for cloud consumers, those utilizing or wishing to utilize cloud services. A large differentiator in cloud types lies in ownership and operation of the cloud infrastructure and three main types of clouds, private, public and hybrid are used to support differing business needs.
Private cloud
Private clouds allow business units to utilize cloud services without needing direct capital investment. The organization makes the investment in the underlying technology resources and support personnel to maintain the equipment and offers cloud resources to business units as a service.
Private cloud resources are not shared with other companies, resulting in predictable performance and optimized workloads. Neither are they restricted by the requirements of other clients. This allows for private cloud services to be customized so that they are tailored for the organization’s needs.
There are disadvantages to utilizing a private cloud. The main disadvantage is the large capital investment required on the part of the organization to implement and expand a private cloud. This makes it less flexible than public cloud offerings and more difficult for organizations to test the waters by deploying pilot or prototype systems or to offer services. Rather, prototypes and pilots must make a business case that results in realistic expectations of long-term revenue to cover capital expenses. However, an organization can set up a private cloud using outside hosted resources. The difference here between a private cloud that is hosted and a public cloud is that the private cloud resources are dedicated to you, not shared among multiple companies.
Public cloud
Public clouds, on the other hand, are what most end users think of when the word “cloud” is mentioned for these clouds are owned and operated by an outside entity and services are provided on a subscription basis, or sometimes for free. Cloud consumers can purchase only the services they need and they can easily increase or decrease their cloud resources by simply purchasing more or less. Public cloud services can also be made available very quickly to consumers because the infrastructure is already there. This is important for companies that need to rapidly respond to demand. In some cases, public cloud services can be provisioned hours or minutes later compared to days or weeks of procurement time in private clouds
Many public cloud services are designed for a specific use case that may or may not fit your own organizational use case. Public cloud providers do this in order to better manage their solution and reduce complexity of upgrades and maintenance. Public cloud services can be customized but this tends to increase the cost of the service and reduce service portability or the ability of the cloud consumer to migrate from one cloud provider to another.
Since public clouds are operated by a third party, consumers of the cloud do not have the same level of visibility into the underlying technology, processes and procedures that go into providing those services. This makes it more difficult to ensure that services in the cloud meet organizational compliance requirements. This is especially crucial when a data breach occurs and the organization must investigate and notify its customers. Public cloud contracts may not specify notification and compliance requirements leading to issues such as lack of timely notification of a data breach, inability to identify breach scope or other required data, and fines and sanctions against the cloud consumer.
Hybrid cloud
Both of these cloud models are powerful methods for providing organizational technology services but not all companies neatly fit into one of these two categories. This has led to the rise of the hybrid cloud. The hybrid cloud extends the private cloud to the public cloud. This adds the flexibility private clouds lack but still allows the organization to manage the data, processes and controls in the way they do with a purely private cloud.
In a hybrid cloud, customizations can be integrated on the private segment while standardized, out-of-the-box, portions of a solution are located on the public segment. This allows the organization to tailor the solution to their needs without limiting their ability to move the standardized elements to another cloud vendor or to spread the workload and service availability risk among multiple cloud vendors.
One significant benefit of the hybrid cloud is the ability to utilize existing infrastructure and to migrate portions of a service to public segments over time. This reduces the disruption a large change would have on system availability and utilization which can increase productivity. The front-end of a system can stay the same for users while back-end components are moved around the hybrid cloud.
The piece that makes this all work is a hybrid cloud service and associated management tools such as Dell Cloud Manager. These tools centralize the administration of the hybrid cloud and interface with the public and private segments to enforce defined rule sets and establish communication and functionality between the components.
Wrapping it up
The hybrid cloud offers many of the advantages of both public and private clouds. This is not to say that the hybrid cloud is the best solution for all cloud scenarios as many services may still find that a private or public solution meets their needs. The biggest news and key element of the hybrid cloud is its fit for the myriad solutions that have yet to make their way to the cloud due to one objection or another or for those that had to settle for one type that did not truly meet their needs. With hybrid in the mix, cloud services can be more ubiquitously deployed and utilized, resulting in increased agility, closer alignment to operational objectives, and a better match of technology expenses to revenues.
For more information:
Dell Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft Learning Library
This post was written as part of the Dell Insight Partners program, which provides news and analysis about the evolving world of tech. Dell sponsored this article, but the opinions are my own and don’t necessarily represent Dell’s positions or strategies.