What are cloud services?

Cloud

Cloud Services

You’ve realized that as a company, you need to move your storage and infrastructure to the cloud services. Cloud storage has many advantages it is reliable, flexible and offers scalablity and security. The question you should ask is what type of cloud solution is best for you.

When businesses first start looking at cloud, they look at the big picture such as advantages of this platform. When the decision to switch to the cloud, the question arises- should you be using public cloud services or private cloud services? Both services offer their own advantages and have their own drawbacks as well.

In this article we’re going to tell you about public cloud and private cloud services and what sets the 2 platforms apart.

What is public cloud?

When people hear cloud services they think public cloud solutions. This is more common and readily available and is quick and easy to access, and is low cost, making them some of the most popular options for businesses to use.

What makes these services ‘public’ is the resources they use are shared between companies. The third party provider will have resources available to them within a data centre. They then ration these services out between the companies that hire them.

Say for example, a third party provider has 100 GB of disk space available to them within the data centre. Customer A needs 25 GB of storage space, Customer B needs 30 GB and Customer C needs 40 GB. The 100 GB of disk space will be shared between them leaving 5 GB available for other customers.

The same approach is taken to the infrastructure that businesses require. Companies then go to the third party who will offer them services that meet their server, memory and CPU needs. The provider will have enough of the resources to cover multiple companies and will assign the relevant resources as a business requires them.

Benefits of Public Cloud

Public cloud is a popular solution due to its lower price tag. The cost of running and maintaining the infrastructure is shared as well due to many companies sharing resources. It is also easy to upgrade and downgrade your package that you have chosen – ‘renting’ more or fewer resources as your need fluctuate. Plus the maintenance and management of resources is taken care on in its entirety by your provider, and you bear no responsibility for it whatsoever – a scenario that many businesses appreciate.

Limitations of Public Cloud

Public cloud solutions aren’t right for every business. While sharing resources does reduce the costs associated with them, it can impact their availability. For example: 100 GB of storage is being shared between 3 companies, if one of them needed extra storage space that went beyond their providers existing capacity, it wouldn’t be available to them. The same may apply when extra processing power is required, or when a company needs their data to be stored in a specific area that their provider doesn’t have access to.

Even though a third party manages all infrastructure and resources is convenient, it can be problematic when you need your servers or memory to be configured in a certain way. You lose control over all the way that your resources are provisioned. While many businesses don’t need that type of control, these are scenarios where it is essential for business operations. Finally multiple people have access to public cloud services as its shared between multiple companies.

The more access is provided the bigger the risk to your data’s security. In an ideal world, only people you directly trust would have access to your infrastructure and that’s where private cloud facilities come in.

What is private cloud?

This type of cloud is all about sharing resources to lower cost involved in their maintenance and upkeep. Private cloud is about one company gaining access to infrastructure. As it set up in an office environment, it provides you with on- premises and cloud solutions or it can be stored within a data centre and it can be managed internally or by a third party.

Benefits of Private cloud

An advantage of private cloud is it provides optimal security, since access is more restricted. Private cloud provides the best possible availability as resources are not being shared between businesses and are available to use as when you may need them.

The biggest benefit is in the control that using private cloud facilities provides. You can control who has access to your resources and how they are used, you can control provisioning and configuration and you can have full control over where your data is stored geographically and in what way.

Limitations of private cloud

Maintaining full control over your resources is a huge benefit for companies, through comes at a premium. Private cloud is more expensive both from the capital outlay perspective and from maintenance and overheads. Also hiring a third party can be expensive to maintain cloud infrastructure.

Another downside to private cloud is that managing it is less efficient. Also running projects at high levels of processing power may require more memory.

Another downside to using private cloud facilities you can’t upgrade or downgrade them as you need. If you need high processing power for one task, you will need to invest in a large amount of CPU. The difficulty in scalability is a big downfall.

Which is best for your business?

Now that you can differentiate between private and public cloud, you can now begin to wonder which is best suited for you. There isn’t a right answer as it will differ from company to company.

That is why you need to chat to an IT Company that is experienced in cloud solutions when switching to a cloud platform.

With 9 years of experience in helping businesses, Datalink IT Services is a perfect cloud partner to walk you through public and private cloud options tailored to your business. Contact us today.

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