Public Cloud Computing

Introduction

When establishing a connection through the cloud, companies and individuals must initially make the choice of entering the public cloud service or establishing their own internal private service. Several factors will influence the choice of the user and must be considered carefully as to which option will best suit the company’s current or future needs, these factors can range from security to flexibility and growth potential of the user.

Cost

Cost would be considered as a high influencing factor in the choice of a specific cloud. Companies who would be considering virtual servers must not only investigate upfront investment, but long-term expenses as well, including operational costs, maintenance, and application expenses. Due to the free availability of the public cloud, many small businesses and start-ups would opt for this choice. In this advancing technologically age, companies are transitioning to the cloud for easy accessibility and control of an ever increasing pool of customers, this has become a necessary step for modern day companies. With the initial strain on finances and resources already associated with the smaller businesses, an added cost of transitioning to a private cloud could prove to be too much for a company with already limited resources. The public cloud is a potential godsend for small businesses, start-ups and individual departments in large organisations that need cheaper and more scalable services that can be set up in response to flexible business needs.

 

Accessibility

Due to the ease of accessibility associated with the public cloud and their mobile applications, an organisation’s employees can work on the go and from a variety of locations around the globe. All the data will be instantly backed up onto the chosen cloud and will be available publicly to any other employee within the specified company. The ability to simultaneously share documents and other files over the Internet can also help support both internal and external collaboration.

 

Security

Security has been a high profile issue over the last number of years with company’s clouds being hacked and information of customers being publicly shared via the internet. Photos stolen from a number of high profile celebrities’ apple iCloud caused serious debate around the IT world. This has introduced doubt in the mind of many companies over the safety of their customer’s information should they transition over to the cloud. Companies and users who feel that they are in less sensitive industries in terms of data protection, will opt for a public cloud system.

 

A consideration must be made for any regulatory or data protection requirements relevant to the organisation before choosing the best suited cloud service. However, a closer look reveals that, implemented correctly, the public cloud can be as secure as the most effectively managed private cloud implementation. While security is an issue in the public cloud, there are new and effective ways to mitigate risk.  Before transitioning to cloud server hosting, it’s wise to check the service provider’s profile and history, and obtaining reference customers in their industry. (Joe Mckendrick, 2013)

 

These views may not be shared by everyone within the many industries, there has been strong debate for the opposite conclusions with the idea of a private cloud logically being the safer option by keeping this information hidden from the public. However, one leading figure in the IT world, Jason Bloomberg, is leading the front in disproving these thoughts. Bloomberg’s published book has been reviewed on ZDNet (12 reasons why public clouds are better than private clouds, March 26, 2013, Joe McKendrick) and I suggest that you read further into the insights which he provides.

 

Reliability

A large amount of emphasis has been placed on the reliability of the public cloud; the sheer number of servers and networks involved in creating a public cloud and the redundancy configurations mean that should one physical component fail, the cloud service would still run unaffected on the remaining components. In some cases, where clouds draw resource from multiple data centres, an entire data centre could go offline and individual cloud services would suffer no ill effect. There is, in other words, no single point of failure which would make a public cloud service vulnerable.

 

Usage

In recent surveys conducted, data concluded that approximately 88% of enterprises are using a form of public cloud. However, with this high amount of companies opting for public cloud, the overall workload still falls beneath that of private cloud. “Only 13 percent of enterprises are running more than 1,000 virtual machines (VMs) in public cloud” (Cloud Management Blog, February 18, 2015, Kim Weins). This information matches in with the idea that the public cloud ideally suits the smaller businesses and organisations around the world building up from the ground. These figures are set to change very rapidly in the coming years as the need for growth will become greater, another advantage of the public cloud and it’s flexibility in the workplace.

 

References

(Cloud Management Blog, February 18th 2015, Kim Weins)

 

(ZDNet,12 reasons why public clouds are better than private clouds, March 26th 2013, Joe McKendrick)