Private and Public Clouds
Enterprises can choose to deploy applications on Public, Private or Hybrid clouds. Cloud Integrators can play a vital part in determining the right cloud path for each organization.
Public Cloud
Public clouds are owned and operated by third parties; they deliver superior economies of scale to customers, as the infrastructure costs are spread among a mix of users, giving each individual client an attractive low-cost, “Pay-as-you-go” model. All customers share the same infrastructure pool with limited configuration, security protections, and availability variances. These are managed and supported by the cloud provider. One of the advantages of a Public cloud is that they may be larger than an enterprises cloud, thus providing the ability to scale seamlessly, on demand.Private Cloud
Private clouds are built exclusively for a single enterprise. They aim to address concerns on data security and offer greater control, which is typically lacking in a public cloud. There are two variations to a private cloud:
- On-premise Private Cloud: On-premise private clouds, also known as internal clouds are hosted within one‟s own data center. This model provides a more standardized process and protection, but is limited in aspects of size and scalability. IT departments would also need to incur the capital and operational costs for the physical resources. This is best suited for applications which require complete control and configurability of the infrastructure and security.
- Externally hosted Private Cloud: This type of private cloud is hosted externally with a cloud provider, where the provider facilitates an exclusive cloud environment with full guarantee of privacy. This is best suited for enterprises that don‟t prefer a public cloud due to sharing of physical resources.
Hybrid Cloud
Hybrid Clouds combine both public and private cloud models. With a Hybrid Cloud, service providers can utilize 3rd party Cloud Providers in a full or partial manner thus increasing the flexibility of computing. The Hybrid cloud environment is capable of providing on-demand, externally provisioned scale. The ability to augment a private cloud with the resources of a public cloud can be used to manage any unexpected surges in workload.Cloud Computing Challenges
Despite its growing influence, concerns regarding cloud computing still remain. In our opinion, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks and the model is worth exploring. Some common challenges are:1. Data Protection
Data Security is a crucial element that warrants scrutiny. Enterprises are reluctant to buy an assurance of business data security from vendors. They fear losing data to competition and the data confidentiality of consumers. In many instances, the actual storage location is not disclosed, adding onto the security concerns of enterprises. In the existing models, firewalls across data centers (owned by enterprises) protect this sensitive information. In the cloud model, Service providers are responsible for maintaining data security and enterprises would have to rely on them.
2. Data Recovery and Availability
All business applications have Service level agreements that are stringently followed. Operational teams play a key role in management of service level agreements and runtime governance of applications. In production environments, operational teams support
Appropriate clustering and Fail over Data Replication System monitoring (Transactions monitoring, logs monitoring and others) Maintenance (Runtime Governance) Disaster recovery Capacity and performance management
If, any of the above mentioned services is under-served by a cloud provider, the damage & impact could be severe.
3. Management Capabilities
Despite there being multiple cloud providers, the management of platform and infrastructure is still in its infancy. Features like „Auto-scaling‟ for example, are a crucial requirement for many enterprises. There is huge potential to improve on the scalability and load balancing features provided today.
4. Regulatory and Compliance Restrictions
In some of the European countries, Government regulations do not allow customer's personal information and other sensitive information to be physically located outside the state or country. In order to meet such requirements, cloud providers need to setup a data center or a storage site exclusively within the country to comply with regulations. Having such an infrastructure may not always be feasible and is a big challenge for cloud providers.
With cloud computing, the action moves to the interface — that is, to the interface between service suppliers and multiple groups of service consumers. Cloud services will demand expertise in distributed services, procurement, risk assessment and service negotiation — areas that many enterprises are only modestly equipped to handle.
