The rise of Cloud computing has brought plenty of new concepts and terminology along with it, including different flavors of ‘public’, ‘private’ and ‘hybrid’ cloud… but what exactly does this mean? Here’s Vitado’s simple guide to understanding these options and the benefits of each:

What is Public Cloud?

Public Cloud can be defined as cloud resources that are owned by a Cloud Services Provider (CSP) or a hosting provider. This is by far the most common option for organizations that don’t already have significant datacenter investments or are committed to moving away from the traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ approach to housing IT infrastructure. The global public cloud market reached $157billion in 2021 and shows no sign of slowing down, with AWS, Azure leading the way. Most organizations now already have some investment in one or both of these two vendors.

Being ‘public’ simply means that the CSP’s resources and services are openly available to any organizations and users.

Each organizations’ cloud resources are accessed via a secure network and customers pay on a consumption model for what they use.

Benefits of Public cloud:

• Eliminates the large-scale capital expenditure associated with provisioning on-premises computing infrastructure
• Eliminates the capital expenditure required to scale-up
• Organizations need only pay for what they use (if well managed and optimized)
• Applications can be quickly provisioned, reducing time-to-value

What is Private Cloud?

Private cloud is where you host your own cloud on your data center or intranet. This means that you own, manage, update and upgrade your own cloud infrastructure; servers, networking, software and platforms. Though not as prevalent as the public cloud adoption, the private cloud market still reached $60.3 billion (USD) in 2020 (Gartner).

Running your own cloud infrastructure also means protecting it all with your own firewall and security solutions, but it is by definition private – there’s no access to users outside of your organization.

Benefits of Private cloud:

• It’s secure for businesses in regulated industries that may require HIPAA Compliant Hosting and PCI Compliant Hosting
• Depending on what resources an organization already has, it can cost less than moving to a public cloud
• Your organization has complete control over resources

What is Hybrid Cloud?

Hybrid is simply an approach of combining public and private cloud resources so that applications and workloads can function in the most practical and efficient way and from an appropriate location.

Hybrid cloud is the most common approach for businesses that already have significant IT infrastructures that they can leverage to get the benefits of cloud computing from existing investments. It can be more difficult to implement and requires in-house skills and resources, infrastructure investment and informed organization to get right, but it can also be a best of both-worlds approach.

Benefits of Hybrid cloud:

• You decide where you want to run your applications
• You control security, compliance and legal obligations
• You have the most flexibility

What Are the Benefits of Cloud?

Whichever option feels right for you, adopting cloud computing offers organizations some huge advantages to scale, flex, become agile and reduce costs.

The ‘as-a-Service’ model reduces the need for large Capex investments up-front as well as freeing businesses from the uncertainty of obtaining and maintaining skills and resources in-house to run IT infrastructure.

Cloud Opex models also help to streamline costs and make financial management more predictable and relatable to business benefits by simply paying for resources consumed in-year. However, these new cloud cost models can also give rise to wastage if cloud resources are not actively governed and optimized using a multi-cloud cost management solution like Vitado by Certero.

For any help with demystifying and understanding cloud costs and governance, contact Vitado today.

www.vitado.com