By Guy Clapperton
The first distinction to make is whether the need in your business is for a public or private cloud implementation. These are as different as the names suggest.
Public cloud tends to be cheaper but is regarded as a riskier, less secure version of the cloud. The client company effectively rents space from someone else’s server farm and it will be multi-tenanted rather than have any areas “roped off” for your particular business. However, it has a number of advantages that should be borne in mind when selecting elements of a business solution:
- Economies of scale. As recently as 2013, Jason Bloomberg made the point in his book “The Agile Architecture Revolution: How Cloud Computing, REST-Based SOA, and Mobile Computing Are Changing Enterprise IT”, that private clouds were typically based on older technology – the tailored approach doesn’t have those economies of scale affordable to the public varieties.
- Public clouds move CapEx costs to OpEx costs immediately rather than “after you’ve commissioned or built your data centre in the cloud”.
- Elasticity is important – a public cloud will have more scope to move up in terms of your use than a private version, which will reach the ceiling in your contract and then need renegotiation.
There are other advantages including security, believe it or not – Amazon and Google suffer many hacking attempts as you would expect; this means, on the other hand, that they’re readier for the hackers than public cloud providers or your in-house on-premise cloud might be.
