This is the cloud era. You and/or your competitor must be thinking of making the move to the cloud and must be reading, researching and may be deciding the right cloud solution and perfect cloud vendor based on your needs. This article is an endeavor to help you in that.
Cloud server hosting is a complete cloud solution in which you get the computing power of multiple connected servers. Onboarding cloud provides a significant room for growth. But with the availability of so many options, the decision of whether to deploy a public, private, or hybrid cloud solution can be a difficult one for even the most experienced organizations.
The following questions can come to your mind if you are in a dilemma on how to choose the best cloud solution for your business. Why might a business choose public over private cloud or hybrid over public or private? What are the benefits and disadvantages of each solution? Is there a “best” cloud solution?
Let’s take a look at the answers to these questions in an attempt to help you in choosing the best solution.
Public cloud
As per wiki, “a cloud is called a “public cloud” when the services are rendered over a network that is open for public use”.
It is a cloud infrastructure in which the public cloud providers (AWS or Azure) make resources, storage, and applications available to multiple tenants via the internet. This makes it possible to reduce a company’s upfront costs, ongoing costs of IT labor and potentially its tax liability.
Advantages of public cloud:
- Low entry cost: Easy to integrate, inexpensive set-up as the cloud management costs are covered by the CSP.
- Scalability to meet the growing needs of a business.
- Metered services: No wasted resources because you pay for what you use.
- Storage: Long-term storage, including tape storage – more cost effective solution (e.g., AWS provides Glacier and Storage Gateway’s Virtual Tape Library).
- Quick deployment: Public cloud deployments also offer fast speed-to-market. In some cases, it’s possible to deploy within hours.
Disadvantages of public cloud:
- Not very secure: Public cloud is not as secure as other cloud deployment options because data of various organizations share a common physical location.
- At times, not compliant: Not all public cloud providers fulfill all your business compliance needs e.g. HIPAA, as it is difficult to maintain in a public cloud environment.
- Performance: It depends on the speed of the internet connectivity.
Private Cloud
As per wiki, “private cloud is the cloud infrastructure operated solely for a single organization, whether managed internally or by a third-party and hosted either internally or externally”.
There are various benefits of a private cloud like Azure private cloud. It offers a greater level of security, compliance, and data privacy, making it ideal for your online business.
Advantages of Private Cloud:
- High level of security: With a private cloud, you get the highly secured environment for your data. It becomes possible as you can yourself configure your infrastructure and systems to have high levels of security.
- More control: Unlike a public cloud, a private cloud provides a much greater degree of control on your data. You can constantly monitor the data as well as customize hardware as per your requirement.
- Can be tailored to specific compliance needs: Unlike a public cloud, you can fulfill your compliance needs with private cloud easily.
Disadvantages of Private Cloud:
- Higher costs: In comparison to the public cloud, a private cloud is more expensive as you have to invest in hardware and maintenance to ensure that it remains running at all the times.
- Complicated implementation: If you are using a third-party service, then you don’t have to worry, otherwise it can be difficult to implement it securely. You’ll need to hire a skilled workforce with extensive knowledge of how this technology can best tie in with your business practices.
- Vendor lock-in: You will have to continue with the same service provider, else you may incur huge costs in migration.
Hybrid Cloud: The best of both clouds.
As discussed above, a public cloud is scalable and quick-to-deploy, whereas a private cloud is managed internally, so it’s more secure but less scalable.
Hybrid cloud presents a unique third cloud deployment option which is a combination of both. It utilizes the best features of both public and private cloud in a mix that best suits your business’ needs.
Hybrid cloud hosting allows businesses to build a customized solution and use the benefits of each deployment model. It gives you the security of the private cloud, the scalability of the public cloud and the full security and control of colocation when you need it.
Advantages of hybrid cloud:
- Cost effective: With a hybrid cloud, businesses can take the benefit of the cost-effectiveness of the public cloud by keeping most of their data in it, while shifting only the most critical business data in the private cloud.
- Increased data speeds: You can configure the hybrid networks to push the data through private servers instead of public ones that improve the load times and increase the data transfer speeds.
Disadvantages of hybrid cloud:
- Infrastructure Dependency: In the hybrid environment, you have to depend on the internal IT for the support to handle the outages.
- Compatibility: It is a major issue when building a hybrid cloud. It’s difficult to manage with dual levels of infrastructure, a private cloud that is controllable by the company, and a public one that the company doesn’t. There are chances that they will be running different stacks.
Which cloud deployment option is best for me?
Hybrid cloud hosting is what multiple organizations are going for. More and more enterprises are adopting hybrid cloud. As per Gartner, 50% of enterprises will be engaged in this model by 2017.
But, what’s best for one business may not be best for your business.
It entirely depends on your organization’s needs and so, you should carefully select your cloud hosting provider in India and across the world.
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