Though Cloud Computing is increasing these days, the basic concepts of cloud computing are still not transparent to many customers.
There are mainly three bases of Cloud Computing methods, viz. Public Private and hybrid Clouds.
The basic categories are the Public and Private Clouds. The third one is a mix of these two types of Clouds for better scalability and security known as the Hybrid Cloud.
Public Clouds:
Public Clouds are the most common in Cloud Computing. They are nothing but a pool of virtual machines on a grid storage to improve uptime and reliability. In general an ordinary VPS has it’s stored in a local SSD or SAN. However when it comes to Public Clouds, the storage is clustered among various locations around the globe. Thus if one area inaccessible, the data can be retrieved from the exact replica residing in another location.
This technique is not directly available to the users unless you have node balancers available in other locations or a special plan with the node balancing option. Most consumers are misled in this option.
The drawback in public clouds is that the resources are distributed among various consumers, e.g Disk Space and RAM. Sometimes the response times slow down due to performance issues caused by other websites on the same machine. In Public Clouds there is always a Security issue. Sometimes, public clouds may not be secure for your organisation depending on the type of the data you are dealing with. In Cloud Computing, Security is also a crucial factor that determines cost and loss of the investment you need to put in order to get the data back.
If you choose a public cloud provider, make sure they are XEN paravirtualized. The openVZ and KVM share the resources among all the users while XEN only shares the kernel, leaving the main RAM usage to your VM itself.
Private Clouds:
As the name suggests, they remain private. Your resources are available to yourself and no one messes with them. They are like having a dedicated server in the cloud. The data is secure and is monitored 24×7. However the main drawback is the cost it incurs. When it is awesome for reliable Cloud Computing, you need to pay some money more to get this in your hand.
Most people don’t choose private clouds but only bigger organisations always rely on private clouds. The data however can be lost if there is any failure. Your data is not stored in many locations as in a Public Cloud thus reducing the data availability concept of Cloud Computing.
But timely backups and a dedicated monitoring of the Cloud will eliminate these issues and leave you without any hassles.
Hybrid Clouds:
They are a mix of both Public and Private Clouds. A Hybrid cloud consists of one Public and Private Cloud. The sensitive data is always stored in the private cloud while the general archived data and regularly updated data like websites and user data can be placed in the public cloud. Hybrid Clouds are an increasing demand on Cloud Computing.
This eliminates the security issue in public clouds and cost issue in private clouds. That doesn’t mean Hybrid Clouds are highly secure.
Every form of Cloud computing is advantageous over the other in some way but they all have certain drawbacks. Data availability is best obtained if the Cloud is monitored 24×7 and it must have timely backups and updates.
In order to achieve high security it is a best practice to use the firewalls along with protection suites for the particular operating system of your server. Security in the Cloud is a big issue these days and they can be taken care of when you cut down unnecessary cost in your cloud there by saving money for some good security of your server.
You might want to check out our Cloud Server Administration Services. We provide Cloud Administration to your Clouds (Public, Private or Hybrid) and also fully managed Cloud Hosting
We use extensive monitoring tools to check your systems health and up-time 24×7. With additional pricing, we provide you with an extensive firewall to secure your server further. Contact us for the pricing.