Cloud Computing Types Of Services

When people talk about cloud, they actually mean one of the 3 models of the cloud. These are Public, Private and Hybrid. The main criteria for segregation of these models are on who owns the rights to control the computing power. This may seem vague at the moment but would become clearer as you read on.

Public Cloud

Customers only use the cloud services. They have no clue on where and which server their data reside. Email is a perfect example of this kind of service. Public cloud is beneficial for most small sized and mid sizes companies because it costs a lotto maintain their own servers and internal services but it will only cost them a fraction to use these services available on cloud. This is because the service provider has a concept of multi tenancy where the cost of the infrastructure is shared among all the users.

Private Cloud
Public cloud may seem fantastic but not always the best choice. There are times when the company would like to have control over the IT computing environment. For those needing this kind of set up, they adopt the private cloud. In private cloud, the IT infrastructure is dedicated or wholly owned by one company and not shared with other organization. Under private cloud there are two categories: on-premise private clouds and externally hosted private clouds. On premise private clouds as the names suggests is where the whole IT set up is fully owned, maintained and reside within the organization’s premises. Externally hosted private clouds are where the IT setup though dedicated to one company would be externally hosted by a third party organization who is an expert on cloud infrastructure.  Private clouds are more secure than public clouds as the resources are not shared. On the cost front, they are more expensive than public clouds. Externally hosted private clouds work out cheaper than the on-premise private clouds. Private clouds are preferred by companies who already have a full fledged IT environment that forms a core part of their business operations.

Hybrid cloud

Both public and private clouds have their own benefits and drawbacks. There times when companies who like to have best of both. Then they go in for hybrids clouds. Hybrid clouds are a combination of usage of both public and private clouds. Usually companies host their mission critical applications on private cloud and less secure applications on public cloud.

Community cloud

Community cloud is like public cloud but the computing resources are shared between the companies in the same category. For example: All organizations dealing with health data of citizens would share their infrastructure.