Public vs Private Clouds – Some History, Issues &  Recent Trends

Public Clouds

Cloud Computing was brought to masses by the public cloud companies like Amazon and Google. They helped the imagination of masses run wild with an attractive utility based pricing model and an ability to scale infinitely (albeit, theoretically) to meet any demand.

One of the major benefits of Cloud Computing is the utility base pricing model (pay for what you use) and bringing in an outside vendor into picture for offering the services; and on-demand use of resources. The single most defining element in the definition of Cloud Computing is the enormous cost savings in OpEx and the zero CapEx.

Enterprises started saying “yes, we can” to the idea of cloud computing. They saw the advantage of Cloud based technologies and wanted to adapt these technologies in their infrastructure. Seeing this trend, the reluctant ones like IBM and others jumped in. As we started digging in deeply about applying the idea of Clouds in a wider enterprise context, we understood that there were many needs and issues that were not obvious earlier. Everything from security to regulation to the need for better infrastructure to even the need to have some fine grained control. These issues became important and needed further understanding.

Private Clouds

The surging forward of public clouds and the initial debunking of the idea by enterprises and vendors like IBM, led to the development of Private Clouds. Private Clouds also grew in popularity out of the fear that Public Clouds needed to be made more secure especially in the enterprise realm and that public clouds failed to meet the regulatory requirements in certain countries.  A number of CTOs and CIOs, were afraid about putting their crucial business data in the hands of third parties; and how it was difficult to customize the public cloud infrastructure to meet their requirements and how the public clouds are too restrictive in this regard. There are many such issues that ensures that the idea of private [...Click headline to read more!]

Public Clouds are infrastructure services offered by companies like Amazon, Rackspace, GoGrid, etc. and platform services like Microsoft Azure, Google App Engine, etc.. These cloud providers take care of deploying, managing, securing the infrastructure and companies can consume it on demand with a pay as you consumption option, much like the utility consumption. Private Clouds are deployments made inside the company’s firewall (on-premise datacenters).

Larger companies and government departments are likely to consider going to the Cloud but in a more controlled and secure fashion via a Private Cloud. A Private Cloud has all the benefits of the Public Clouds but it is hosted inside the firewall of the company or department it is supporting. Full control of who has access to data is maintained while all the benefits of the Cloud are realized. [...Click headline to read more]

Most experts agree that the cloud is poised for considerable growth, but customers worry about how their data is stored. Who might have access to it, and can it be read while it is in transit? The issues with cloud computing at this point include security, performance, costs, service and vendor viability. [...Click headline to read more]

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud will allow businesses to carve out isolated cloud resources for their own private network without ever having to connect them to the public Internet. Second–and perhaps more important–Amazon VPC works with software licenses in such a way that businesses can run their virtualized applications in the cloud as if they were installed in computers. [...Click headline to read more]