Managed Solutions Posted on 10/14/2010 7:54 AM | Comments (0)

Are you confused about the differences between a public, hybrid, or private cloud?

Let me start by saying you’re not the only one, and this continues to be a hot topic for discussion panels and keynotes at every trade show we attend.  For the past year our company has sponsored numerous events and conferences, and I like many of the attendees read through the course or session overviews to decide which ones are the most interesting while trying to get a seat near the exit, preferably with an electrical outlet for recharging my laptop and/or phone throughout the day.  After listening to speakers, panel discussions, and attendees at the show it seems we have some general confusion on what the differences are between various cloud offerings.  The following are a few helpful tips to clear the confusion.

Private Clouds – A dedicated collection of computing components for a single tenant that wishes to leverage the elasticity and scalability of cloud computing technologies.  Hot-add computing power, Single Sign On (SSO), and Active Directory (AD) integration are just a few features available under these type of offerings.  Organizations leverage the cloud through virtualization technologies while retaining security and control over their data and systems. This enables the implementation of a new Business Service without the costs of building dedicated infrastructure for each new requirement. It also enables organizations to avoid the age old problem of designing and implementing for peak loads on day 1. (VMware vSphere’s Clustering and Dynamic Resource Scheduling features are examples of these types of concepts)

Public Clouds – A collection of computing components that typically enables a single type of Business Service for multiple organizations (multi-tenant services and applications). Service provider such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), IBM’s Blue Cloud, Sun Cloud, Google AppEngine and Windows Azure Platform make these services available to the general public over the Internet.

Hybrid Clouds – A mixture of both the private and public clouds where an organization wishes to maintain control over business critical applications and services while leveraging external public cloud providers for some services.  Think of an organization that uses a Private Cloud for their email system, and a Public Cloud account for email filtering.