Public, Private, and Hybrid Cloud Computing Types

Reality or Hype,Public, Private, and Hybrid Cloud Computing Types

Cloud computing comes in three forms: public clouds, private clouds, and hybrids clouds. Depending on the type of data you're working with, you'll want to compare public, private, and hybrid clouds in terms of the different levels of security and management required

Public Cloud
A public cloud is one in which the services and infrastructure are provided off-site over the Internet. These clouds offer the greatest level of efficiency in shared resources; however, they are also more vulnerable than private clouds. A public cloud is the obvious choice when 

• Used to run operations significantly more efficient, for example, with the storage of non-sensitive content, like online document collaboration, emails and more.
• Your standardized workload for applications is used by lots of people, such as e-mail.
• You need to test and develop application code.
• You have SaaS (Software as a Service) applications from a vendor who has a well-implemented security strategy.
• You need incremental capacity (the ability to add computer capacity for peak times).
• You’re doing collaboration projects.
• You’re doing an ad-hoc software development project using a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering cloud.

Private Cloud

A private cloud allows customers the benefits of cloud computing—self-service, automation, consolidation and metered usage—but behind the safety of their firewall on their own virtual private network. Although there are many advantages to the public cloud, enterprises very rarely deploy 100% of their applications into the public cloud. Logistically, it is often much simpler to move from your on-premises environment to a private cloud than from on-premises to public cloud. Private cloud environments can be configured to support any application, just as your datacenter currently hosts it. Private cloud is an especially attractive option if certain features in legacy applications prevent some applications from operating well in the public cloud.

Ideally suited for any organization that needs to store and process private data or carry out sensitive tasks. A private cloud could be utilized by companies that are required by regulation to store sensitive data internally and who will still want to benefit from some of the advantages of cloud computing inside their business infrastructure, like on-demand resource allocation.

Hybrid Cloud:
With hybrid clouds, organizations mix and match public- and private-cloud resources based on technical and business requirements. For example, an organization may run an application primarily in its private cloud, but tap into public-cloud resources during periods of peak demand. Or it may run an application primarily in a public- cloud environment while keeping some data relating to that application in its private cloud for compliance reasons.

A hybrid cloud could also theoretically consist of multiple private and/or public clouds. The enterprise data center denoted in the illustration may have active servers (virtualized or physical) that are not included in the private cloud.

Important benefits o Operational flexibility: run mission critical on private cloud, dev/test on public cloud o Scalability: run peak and bursty workloads on the public cloud.