Tech Brief: Evaluating Public vs. Private Clouds

Once the cloud is sufficiently defined, it’s necessary to then examine the different enterprise cloud offerings, their pros and cons, and their appropriate use cases to determine which is best for a particular organizational need. Specifically, we’ll take a look at the public, or external, cloud and the private, or internal, cloud.

Let’s first take a look at the public, external cloud. There is a great deal of buzz in the SMB and even enterprise market about public cloud infrastructure solutions. The public cloud is a cloud implementation housed offsite and controlled by a third party. With pay-as-you-use cost models and massively reduced capital needs, public clouds offer the promise of cost savings and efficiency gains. However, the public cloud offers drawbacks as well.

Benefits of the Public Cloud

• Consumption-Based Pricing: Users pay for resources as used, allowing for capacity fluctuations over time.
• Significant Investment Not Required: With the offsite public cloud, capital equipment and staff are reduced.
• Cost Savings: Potentially significant cost benefits are possible from providers’ economies of scale.
• Contractual SLAs: Service providers are motivated to deliver.

Drawbacks of the Public Cloud

• Data Security: Sensitive data is shared beyond the corporate firewall.
• Limited Functionality: Support for operating system and applications may not address the needs of the users.
• Hard-to-Use: Solution is not optimized for non-technical users and often lacks self-service capabilities.
• Geographic Locality: Distance poses challenges with access performance and user application content.

Next we take a look at the internal, private cloud. The private cloud is intended to bring all of the flexibility, ease-of-use and operational efficiency gains of the public cloud while maintaining corporate security and melding with existing IT processes and systems.

Benefits of the Private Cloud

• Security: All data and secure information remains behind the corporate firewall.
• Availability: IT can architect and design infrastructure and systems to meet specific uptime requirements.
• Specific Functionality: Private clouds can be designed for specific operating systems, applications, and use cases, unique to each enterprise organization.
• Ease-of-Use: Implementations are designed specifically with users in mind.
• Support Accountability: There is no ambiguity or division of support responsibilities.

Drawbacks of the Private Cloud

• Initial Investment: There can be up-front investments in capital and staff.
• Operating Costs: The enterprise maintains ongoing operating costs for the cloud.
• Service Level Commitment: Users may not get service level desired.