Public vs private: Which cloud is best for business?

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Yet equally large companies are just as evangelical about the public cloud, and incredibly dismissive of the private model

“The private cloud is really no different than what has been offered for the last 30 years,” claimed Kay Kinton, public relations manager at Amazon Web Services.

“In our opinion the [public cloud] has some key characteristics [such as it] eliminates capex (capital expenditure), allows you to pay for what you use, has true elastic capacity so users can scale up and down as their needs demand [and] allows you to move very quickly and provision servers in minutes”

“What people are calling private clouds doesn’t let companies enjoy most of these benefits.”

However despite the dedicated big shot companies, backing up their way over the other, the resounding answer from most companies and analysts seems to be make a mixture of the two.

“The future for the cloud is the hybrid cloud,” claimed Clive Longbottom, service director and business process analyst at Quocirca.

“Some applications will remain on a one application per server model, as organisations will be loathe to take a massive step into what is still the relative unknown, and/or have invested so much money into the application that it becomes a "career limiting decision" to try and persuade the business that it should be decommissioned and replaced with a cloud alternative.”

“Other functionality will be placed on the private cloud - a highly virtualised platform that spans between existing owned data centres and co-lo and external data centres providing that extra resource that is required.”

He strongly believes that more data will leave the traditional data centres where everything is held in house and not virtualised to its full capability, but no one model is set to be the overall winner for businesses.

This was backed up by Stace Hipperson, chief technology officer (CTO) at Intergence, who told IT PRO he was already seeing a dominance of the mixture method.

“A trend we're seeing at Intergence is people moving to hybrid networking where they're using a combination of both public and private clouds and, particularly for larger enterprises, this gives them the best of both worlds,” he said.

Each business to their own

Despite the to and fro between the models, and even with the hybrid option, it all depends on what your individual business needs are.

If you are a small business that doesn’t want to become your own IT administrator with a server to run, then perhaps you should head for the public cloud. If you are an established business that has just invested in tons of infrastructure, maybe the private is best for you.

But before leaping into any new model consider what your budget is, the amount of data and applications you need to run and, most of all, what you feel is right for your business.

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