Public vs private: Which cloud is best for business?

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Last year, people were still arguing over definitions of cloud computing, but this year the technology has gained momentum.

From the hardware top cats through to the security bigwigs, the vast majority of the tech community is getting on board and bringing out their own products to tackle any obstacles the new model might face.

Yet one fight still rages on: public or private?

Public

The public cloud is essentially outsourcing your data centre. An external company offers up its data centre for rent and you can chose the number of servers or the amount of storage you want to run out there, as well as the applications. You can then access it remotely from a PC.

The key selling point of this model is cost savings. Not only does it mean you don’t have to pay for all the hardware yourself, but you don’t have to pay for the maintenance and staffing costs as well.

There is also a widely adopted “pay as you go” model with public clouds, allowing you to rent the space from as little as an hour – often used by developers testing applications – up to months or years but paying by the month rather than in a big lump sum.

The public cloud space is dominated by players like Amazon and Google, although smaller companies like Elastic Hosts are getting in on the act too whilst firms like Salesforce.com offer the ability to run a single application in the cloud.

Private

The private cloud adds more of a personal touch to the proceedings. Many companies, especially larger institutions like banks or the public sector, are concerned about the security of letting what could be very confidential information out from behind their own firewall.

This model keeps all of your physical hardware within your own location, meaning the day to day running of the systems, maintenance, and – most importantly – security aspects, are run in house.

However, it is a highly virtualised environment, using extra software to optimise your hardware to its fullest potential and ease the transactions of data and information between servers both in one office or to other locations your company might have.

EMC is a large advocate of this but many of the other hardware vendors such as HP, IBM and Dell offer software solutions and specifically designed products to cope with the new environment.

Pros and cons

Both are accepted and workable models but they also come with their own positives and negatives to contend with.

“Businesses that use public clouds can... enjoy the benefits that come with any large scale deployment such as highly available, enterprise class infrastructure, but at a fraction of the cost,” Rob Lovell, chief executive of ThinkGrid told IT PRO.

As previously mentioned, a company would not have to front up the costs for all the servers, storage, or cables to link them up. Even more than that, they would not have to pay for the staff to keep the data centre running in perfect order.

Also when you sign up to fit out your data centre with all the products you need, companies can end up locked in and stuck with those products for a very long time.

The pay as you go model adopted within the public cloud means if you aren’t happy with the service you are receiving there is no such thing as vendor lock in and you can jump ship at any time - but only if such clouds work on the same standards and are interoperable.

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