In my last article, I tried to briefly introduce you to the concept of Cloud and Cloud computing  Now let us understand, what are the types of Clouds. We basically have three types of Clouds, namely, Public Clouds, Private Clouds and Hybrid Clouds.

Types of Clouds Computing

Public Clouds

These are the clouds which are open for use by general public and they exist beyond the firewall of an organization, fully hosted and managed by vendors like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. They strictly follow “Pay as you go” model which helps start ups to start small and go big without investing much in the IT infrastructure.

Here a user does not have a control on the management of the resources. Everything is managed by the third party and it’s their responsibility to apply software updates,security patches etc .

Though they are quite effective and eases an organization effort since everything is already there, it does face some criticism, esp on security related issue.

Private Clouds

These are the types of clouds which exist within the boundaries (firewall) of an organization. It is totally managed by an enterprise and has all the features of Public Clouds with a major difference that it has to take care the underlying IT infrastructure. They are more secure as they are internal to an organization and they shuffle resources according to their business needs.

They are best suited for the applications which are related to tight security and follows some stringent policies or are meant for regulatory purposes. It is not very easy for an organization to go with a Private Cloud due to its complexity and management so they are often used by enterprises who have made huge investments in their IT infrastructure and have the man power and abilities to manage it.

Hybrid Clouds

They consist of external and internal providers, viz a mix of public and private clouds. Secure & critical apps are managed by an organization  and the not-so-critical & secure apps by the third party vendor. They have a unique identity, bound by standard technology, thus enabling data and application portability. They are used in the situations like Cloud Bursting.

In most countries,we are going to see lot of investment in the Hybrid Clouds in the next decade, for the simple reason, that lot of companies are skeptical about the Cloud’s Security and they prefer that the critical data be managed by themselves and the non-critical data by the external provider.

From an end-user perspective, Public Clouds will be more interesting for them, we all use public clouds services like Microsoft Office Web apps, Windows Live Mesh 2011, Google Docs, etc; whereas an enterprises will be having an interest in private & hybrid clouds.I will suggest them to check Microsoft Exchange online, Share Point online etc for this .

• Tags: Cloud