Cloud computing refers to computing resources, data, and applications that run on servers in a data center maintained by a cloud vendor and are accessed over the internet.
Moving to a cloud computing model can deliver benefits well beyond IT operations and provide a return on investment across an organization. The cloud can lower the up-front capital expenditure and ongoing staffing costs required to equip and run an on-premises data center. It can let IT teams focus more on new projects and development and less on manual, repetitive work. More broadly, using the industry best practices that are built into cloud applications can help improve business processes and increase employee productivity. Cloud apps and infrastructure can be accessed remotely, which can improve efficiency and facilitate remote work, which, in turn, can help boost employee satisfaction and retention. And being able to quickly add (or cut) computing capacity or adopt new capabilities can help an organization better seize opportunities or respond to downturns.
Cloud technology can be delivered via public, private, and hybrid cloud models.
Public Cloud
A public cloud is where the cloud provider offers computing capacity and applications over the internet, the computing infrastructure resides in the vendor’s data center, and cloud customers share the vendor’s IT infrastructure. That means multiple organizations might have workloads running on any given public cloud server. Public cloud providers usually offer a tiered pay-per-use model with standards for availability, performance, and speed (called service level agreements or SLAs). Organizations are relieved from maintenance and upkeep duties, such as security patches and hardware upgrades, as these are the responsibility of the provider. This means organizations and their IT staff can spend their energy on more creative work, such as developing new applications or exploring the capabilities of cloud-enabled features such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Private Cloud
With a private cloud, a single organization uses a dedicated portion of the cloud vendor’s computing resources. Those resources might be dedicated hardware in the cloud provider’s data center or they may be hosted in the customer organization’s data center and run by the provider. Organizations often choose a private cloud to handle sensitive data or meet specific performance criteria, data control requirements, or other business needs that justify the cost, which is higher than the cost of sharing resources on a public cloud. Depending on the private cloud vendor, data mobility, feature availability, and scalability may be limited, so these factors should be part of any decision to use a private cloud.
Hybrid Cloud
Hybrid clouds make use of public and private clouds, and in some cases, they also integrate on-premises data centers. Hybrid clouds can be configured in numerous ways to meet an organization’s unique needs, and the final design is often based on what data needs to be tightly controlled and what data can be stored using shared resources. For example, an organization may choose to run predictable internal operations, such as finance and supply chain, on a private cloud while running customer-facing web applications on a public cloud so they can scale up and down as demand changes. Or an organization might use the public cloud to house nonproprietary, less sensitive data and a private cloud for data such as health records or sensitive customer information with higher regulatory obligations. When using a hybrid cloud, it’s most important to have a clear plan for the functionality, security, and performance of each element to help ensure a highly available and smooth operation.