Which Cloud is best for your business?

Cloud - In a nutshell, what exactly is cloud? A cloud platform utilises the standard cloud computing model to create virtual machines, applications or storage available to remote users.

Public Cloud or Private Cloud?

Public cloud shares resources and hardware amongst multiple organisations or end-users. As such, the private cloud is by definition more exclusive since the hardware is dedicated to your utilisation. This, by definition, means that a private cloud serves a single organisation.

It is a common misconception that private cloud means on-premise cloud. A private cloud can be hosted and fully managed by a Managed Service Provider (MSP). The solutions are maintained and run over private networks dedicated to the organisation in question regardless of location.

In general, the public cloud tends to cost less at the lower end of the spectrum of resource usage. Therefore, considerable savings can be made as you scale up in a private cloud environment. Regardless of this fact, a public cloud solution has a more significant degree of scalability due to the availability of resources, though it may be less customisable.

Where private cloud really comes into its own is in the security and control over the compute resources and features utilised by the end-users.

Public Cloud or Hybrid Cloud

While there’s a reasonably clear distinction between public and private cloud, hybrid cloud tends to blur that line. This is because the hybrid cloud combines the best aspects of both public and private cloud to create more flexible solutions and improve scalability.

A hybrid cloud platform makes it possible to share information between private cloud and public cloud solutions. This concept allows businesses to get significant benefits from their private cloud infrastructure by segregating workloads and horizontally scaling solutions for a stable and consistent workload. Sporadic workloads can then be scaled up or down on the public cloud to meet these fluctuations in demand. Additionally, you can rely on public cloud to deal with excessive workloads.

Benefits of Public Cloud

A public cloud may appear like a less dedicated approach to cloud computing. The reality is that there are benefits to utilising public cloud that is obvious when you put solutions into perspective. The key benefit is the lower cost of maintaining the infrastructure and services to both on-premise and managed private cloud. If you have an on-premise private cloud, the onus is naturally on your business to keep that online and functioning. The responsibility of the full-stack is on your business.

Suppose you take an MSP private cloud solution. In that case, naturally, many of the headaches around infrastructure will be removed due to the Infrastructure-as-a-Service route. Naturally, with the responsibility of infrastructure removed, you can focus all your efforts on the administration of the solution, i.e. creating the resources dedicated for your applications.

There is no requirement to maintain any internal resource management with a public cloud — hardware and software, where resources are unlimited. Therefore, assuming you have a sufficient budget, you can create resources as you see fit.

Typically in public cloud environments, you only pay for the cloud services you utilise. As a result, you are not left with unnecessary features and costs that are not useful to your business needs. Likewise, public cloud entails a lower staffing cost, as you don’t need to pay for a team to maintain and optimise the onsite cloud infrastructure.

The additional benefit of public cloud is that deployment is usually easier and faster due to the general public nature of the solutions. Less consultancy is required for the infrastructure requirements; as such, the route to market is quicker.

Problems with Public Cloud

All organisations are unique as such each business will face its own hurdles when making the move to the public cloud.

Many clients realise too late that the pay-as-you-go model can become prohibitively expensive as businesses fail to monitor or budget for cloud use correctly.

Many other clients suggest that certain public cloud platforms can cause increased latency and unanticipated performance issues, in particular in hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments. Nevertheless, for the majority of organisations, the largest challenges associated with public cloud is the overall security concerns in a relation to the segregation of data for compliance and data sovereignty laws.

Security and Compliance Concerns

It is worth stating that public cloud providers and managed service providers take security very seriously since their reputation relies on the stability and security of their platforms. In most cases, public cloud options are more up to date concerning security measures and offer better data protection than the average organisation’s on-premise computers and servers. Regardless, when you place your data into a public cloud platform, the security is no longer necessary entirely in your domain. In these cases, you cannot be in complete control of how it is protected or maintained. Data segregation and shared storage platforms have historically been an issue for specific industries; however, as technologies have improved, secure and safe local segregation of data has resolved many of these woes.

Data Sovereignty is a key phrase that has been thrown around for a long time now. During the infancy of public cloud, people were not always fully aware of the jurisdiction that their data was being stored. This was the same for SaaS platforms which many providers were adapting. As this issue came to a head over the last few years, public cloud providers have started to offer storage locations of your choice.

Depending on your industry and relative compliance requirements, not having direct security control may be a liability. This could effectively eliminate the public cloud as a viable option for your business. Organisations that wish to maintain high user privacy and data security levels may consider using a private cloud solution or take the hybrid approach. This way, they can break down their requirements into public cloud candidates and more secure workloads, which must be deployed to the private cloud for security reasons. Nevertheless, if you work with an established and trusted cloud provider, these security concerns are alleviated.

Find the Right Solution for your Problem

At the end of the day, the most critical question to ask when contemplating potential cloud solutions is this: What problem do I have, and what is the right solution for that problem?

The public cloud offers many benefits in terms of cost and ease of deployment. Moreover, it may provide the best return on your investment compared to more cost-intensive private and hybrid solutions. Nevertheless, if other options seem like the clear choice, then those are the ones you should further explore.

At the end of the day Coreix is here to help - Consultancy is free, so feel free to contact us to find the right solution to your technological needs.