Cloudbusting: choosing the right cloud for your business

When it comes to making informed decisions about which cloud solution will work best for their organisation’s data and application workloads, IT decision makers must consider a variety of factors. Everything from cost and scalability through to control, bandwidth, security and ease of use.

When it comes to determining whether private or public cloud is best, unfortunately there’s no ‘one size fits all’ answer. However, a comparison of their key features and strengths can help bring clarity to this challenging decision.

Public cloud

Delivered, managed and maintained by third-party cloud providers, public cloud services are highly popular and with good reason. In this model, the provider owns and operates all hardware, software, servers and storage and delivers these resources via the internet to organisations that rent a portion of these resources on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Using a public cloud has multiple advantages. These include:

· Cost efficiency – With public cloud, organisations can avoid hefty upfront hardware, software licensing and ongoing maintenance costs. Instead, they’re able to take advantage of flexible subscription models that offer hourly or monthly billing. According to some studies, based on standardised benchmarks, public cloud can deliver a 30% cost reduction compared to hyperscalers.

· Scalability – Because public clouds can scale resources up or down on demand, organisations are able to easily handle fluctuations in demand or storage requirements. Simple to set up and manage, public cloud gives organisations a quick and agile way to tap into the networking, storage and compute power they need. The moment they need it.

· Reliability – Providing consistent and dependable services with minimal downtime, thanks to a vast network of servers that ensure against failure, public clouds typically offer SLAs guaranteeing 99.99% uptime and can enhance compliance with a variety of regulatory requirements.

When it comes to deployment, public cloud is fast and straightforward to initiate as there is no physical infrastructure to set up or manage. Plus, organisations don’t need to predict how many applications are run or how much data needs to be stored as the public cloud can handle it.

However, there are some drawbacks to keep in mind. Since multiple organisations share public cloud environments, privacy and compliance concerns can be an issue and robust encryption and strict access controls may be needed to overcome this challenge.

Given that scalability is a key advantage of the public cloud model, it’s best suited for a number of specific use cases. These include:

· Deploying web applications, APIs and content delivery networks

· Spinning up temporary environments for development, testing and prototyping

· Processing large data sets

· Hosting collaboration tools, email exchanges and productivity suites.

Private cloud

Private cloud architectures provide a dedicated and secure infrastructure that is tailored to an organisation’s specific business needs. Since these isolated environments are used by a single organisation, they offer the highest level of security: organisations can physically secure their servers, access their data using private networks, and have full control over security protocols.

The advantages offered by private cloud include:

· Elevated regulatory adherence – Offering enhanced security and enforcement controls, private cloud is ideal for organisations operating in sectors such as healthcare, government and financial services that need to handle sensitive data in a highly compliant way. With private cloud, organisations get to control where and how data is stored and managed.

· Customisation – Organisations can tailor their private cloud environment to their exact needs, finetuning hardware, software and configurations to enable optimal performance, resource utilisation and bandwidth capabilities. All resources are reserved for the sole use of the organisation, which in turn assures consistent and reliable connectivity. Plus, environments can be designed to support specific standards or technology solutions and transformed in line with evolving organisational needs.

· Cost predictability – Private clouds offer long-term price predictability based on a fixed infrastructure cost. This supports more accurate budgeting and financial forecasting as organisations know exactly what resources are in operation and how much these will cost over time.

In relation to scaling and managing resources, private clouds can include integrated managed services and self-service tools that enable authorised users to provision resources as and when required. This enhances operational efficiencies, minimises administrative overheads and ensures that tasks such as maintenance, monitoring and troubleshooting are taken care of. On the flip side, private clouds require upfront investment in hardware, software and infrastructure and further ongoing investment may be required to keep these environments current with technology changes.

Providing organisations with a dedicated environment, featuring customised network and hardware configurations that are exclusive to them, private cloud is ideal for:

· Storing sensitive data, confidential information and intellectual property

· Running legacy applications that won’t work in a public environment

· Meeting industry-specific regulations

· Undertaking HPC simulations and modelling.

A third way: hybrid cloud

Combining the flexibility and scalability of the public cloud with the control and security offered by private infrastructure, hybrid cloud is a compelling alternative for organisations that want to take advantage of the public cloud’s infinite and agile resources when needed, while benefiting from the control and security offered by a private infrastructure. With hybrid cloud, organisations can seamlessly scale up their on-premises infrastructure to the public cloud and free up resources for more sensitive data and applications.

This makes hybrid cloud ideal for organisations that want to:

· Maintain steady critical workloads on a private cloud - Using public cloud for variable demands or short-term projects.

· Optimise costs - Keeping predictable workloads on a private cloud where long term costs might be lower.

· Retain highly sensitive data in their own data centre – Meeting client or regulatory demands.

Providing choice, flexibility and more deployment options, hybrid cloud enables organisations to:

· Take advantage of additional resources in the public cloud to handle fluctuating workloads

· Tap into cutting edge technologies like AI, machine learning and big data analytics via the public cloud, so they can innovate at speed and in a cost-controlled way.

As organisations prepare to navigate their cloud journey, undertaking a detailed needs assessment will be essential to ensure that the cloud model chosen aligns fully with all identified business and risk management objectives. Ultimately, the right cloud model choice will depend on an organisation’s specific operational needs, strategic goals and internal resources.