Private vs. Public Cloud: What Is Good For Your Business?

Typically, only if an organisation has strict in-house policies, often based on security requirements, is a private cloud worth embarking on. Banks and government bodies are good examples of this where they have infrastructures sizable enough to create economies of scale, but the data must not be kept on a shared infrastructure.

One compromise to the problem is the ‘Virtual Private Cloud’ where service providers host dedicated clouds for customers. Customers take advantage of the tools and expertise of the service provider that manages the cloud, however the underlying infrastructure is dedicated to that customer.

Using this model, particularly for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), enterprises get the low cost, pay-as-you-use flexible computing without the security, compliance and performance concerns of the public cloud, or the investment required to develop their own cloud infrastructure.

However you look at it, the cloud is a service orientated architecture and this means it is based on SLAs. Perhaps the biggest concern we see with the enterprise cloud is the SLAs service providers are committing to, especially in the ‘one size fits all’ world that is the public cloud.

Most of the SLAs are availability based with little consideration to performance and recovery, both key requirements of an enterprise class IT infrastructure. As the public cloud grows and becomes more and more federated, with cloud providers offering services based on other cloud solutions, SLA could be hard to track and manage.

In summary, there is no right or wrong answer. The cloud offers a vast number of solutions across a wide range of deployment models but organisations need to carefully review their requirements and the services offered by providers before flying into the clouds.....