Cloud Computing; Basic Walk-through

Cloud computing is the on demand delivery of IT solutions. Instead of investing capital in buying, owning, and maintaining physical servers and data centers, cloud computing enable the organizations to access the services such as, computing, storages, and databases, whenever required from the desired cloud providers.

Now, let us move ahead and have a look at some of the key benefits of cloud computing.

• Cost: Cloud computing eliminates the capital expense of buying software and hardware to set-up and operate onsite data centers.
• Speed: Most cloud computing services provides self and on demand service. Vast amount of computing services can be allocated in minutes.
• Global Scale: The benefits of cloud computing services includes the ability to scale elastically i.e. delivering the right amount of resources (computing power, storage, bandwidth), when it is needed and from the desired geographic location.
• Security: Many cloud providers offer a broad set of policies, technologies, and controls that strengthen the overall security. This ultimately helps to protect the data, applications, and infrastructure from potential threats.

There are three fundamental cloud deployment models, which includes:

Public Cloud: Public clouds are hosted by a cloud service provider who rents space on their cloud to multiple customers. Those customers generally pay for the services, which they actually use.

Benefits of using a Public Cloud

• It is less expensive, as it follows pay-as-you-go model
• It reduces the risk of crash also it saves the cost in hiring the resource for maintenance, as the third-party provider is liable to maintain the cloud services
• This cloud is highly scalable and reliable, as you get the flexibility of on-demand resources

Drawbacks of using a Public Cloud

Public clouds are reliable and can be used when data control and compliance is not a major concern for the customer. Many organizations analyzed and concluded that this cloud lacks security and hardware control. Compliance regulation becomes a pain area, because the servers are shared and the provider holds the maintenance rights.

Private Cloud: Private cloud is accessible and manipulated only by a single organization i.e. resources (servers, Virtual Machines, Databases, etc.) of this solution are accessible only to a particular organization.

Advantages of using a Private Cloud

The private cloud facilitates a dedicated service provider. It ensures the complete data control, enhanced scalability, flexibility, security, and automation.

Drawbacks of using a Private Cloud

Apart from the benefits such as scalability and security, setting-up private cloud is expensive. Moreover, organizations are liable to maintain and troubleshoot the servers constantly.

Hybrid Cloud: As it is clear from its name "Hybrid", this cloud implements the concept of both public and private cloud services with a logical synchronization. Owning this cloud provides the flexibility to move applications and data between a private cloud and a public cloud.

Most of the organizations prefer to choose the hybrid model, as it offers many business benefits, which includes, fulfilling data and regulatory requirements, troubleshooting latency issues, and more.

Advantages of using a using Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid cloud model enables customers to switch the data between on-premise and third party service provider. This enhances the flexibility, control, and cost saving. Using hybrid model, organizations can address the temporary demand hikes with minimum capital.

Hybrid cloud provides the flexibility to choose the cloud as per the workload, thus enriching the organizations with limitless and seamless service.

Drawbacks of using a Hybrid Cloud

Although hybrid cloud provides ample number of advantages, the major concern of data security still exist. As discussed above, hybrid cloud is a combination of both public and private cloud, thus transferring sensitive data/information via a network with third party interference, introduces the uncalculated risk of security concern for most of the organizations.