Private vs Public? Which Cloud is Best for Business?

21 May Private vs Public? Which Cloud is Best for Business?

Cloud computing, and its spin-off the cloud SAAS platform, has matured enough to the point where most businesses at least understand the appeal, even if they haven’t fully deployed to the cloud yet. And although most everyone understands cloud computing and the benefits and drawbacks it presents to businesses, the debate over cloud services still rages on — this time arguing the merits of private clouds vs. public clouds.

Public Cloud

Public clouds have been around for a fairly long time now, and are pretty well understood in a business setting. Their advantages lie mainly in their ability to scale up or down quickly, keeping your hardware or software use efficient. So, for example, if you use a cloud CRM suite, you can change the number of salespeople who can have access to it quickly and efficiently, keeping you from having to buy a large-scale software license and overpaying for employees that you don’t have or that don’t need to use the software. Similarly, you can scale hardware up and down as needed, keeping your hardware use as efficient and lean as possible and saving money.

Are there any downsides to public cloud software? Of course! The biggest downside is the loss of full control. Since you are leasing space on public servers, your ability to dictate certain things becomes severely limited. For instance, you may be able to specify broad geographic regions for your hosting locations (e.g. Southeast, Northwest, Mid-Atlantic, etc.) instead of specific states, counties, or cities.  You also will most likely not be able to control who else is sharing server space with you.  This means that if someone else does something wrong, like causes the server to crash or spreads malware on to the server, your processes could be affected.

USACI’s public cloud offering, XenWinGo, has taken into account these downsides.  Our clients are located in a state of the art datacenter Plano, TX.  Each client is also hosted on their own virtual server isolated from other clients.

Private Cloud

XenWinGo also offers a private cloud that can be managed by our staff or your own IT administrator.  Private cloud computing is the same concept, except the servers that are used to provide you with remote functionality are private to you alone, and not shared with anyone else. Instead of renting as-needed space on a public server, you rent out an entire server or group of servers. Private cloud computing offers hardware that is dedicated to your company 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, rather than being shuffled around on public servers with tons of other companies.

Some private clouds are hosted internally, on servers completely owned, operated, and controlled by your own internal IT staff, and sometimes even housed on-location. Other times, servers are leased from a co-location or managed hosting provider. In either case, you have almost total control of what happens on your server.

The major downside of private cloud hosting is that much of the flexibility that you get from having a cloud infrastructure is lost when you set up a private cloud. Instead of being able to scale server space up almost infinitely when demand is high and down to next to nothing when demand is low, you are locked into a pre-set range of server utilization based on how much hardware you’ve purchased.

While you can still scale up or down within the range of that hardware by, for example, using virtual servers and the like, you don’t have the huge range of possibilities, and your costs remain mostly static. You also take on the additional responsibilities of managing your new hardware — at best, this means paying an outsourcing firm to manage it for you, and at worst it means that your internal IT department will have to actively control the servers.

Conclusion

So which is better for your business, a public cloud or a private cloud? Ultimately, the choice largely depends on what you can handle and where you foresee your business growing.

For small businesses without a lot of compliance or regulatory oversight, a public cloud is generally the most cost-effective solution. Likewise, if you expect your infrastructure requirements to be very unstable, a public cloud offers you a chance to streamline efficiency and save a few dollars on hardware. If, however, you require strict management over your servers, have mostly steady server requirements, and have the staff to effectively manage the infrastructure, a private cloud can give you the kind of supervision and control you need.