Different types of Cloud hosting & deployment options
Cloud hosting is now well explained & demonstrated by most of the IT experts as an emerging technology wherein data, applications, disc space, memory etc are streamed to users as services delivered over the internet. Though there is dilemma about cloud hosting in most of IT organizations, in terms of what, when and how? People are still confused about when to migrate to cloud? How to migrate & additionally what type of cloud to choose?
Typically there are 3 types of cloud hosting – private cloud which encompass internal services, external public services and a combination of both called as hybrid.
• Private clouds:
Private cloud is also known as internal cloud, which allows sharing IT resources & applications over the company intranet which can be accessed by users within that organization only. This becomes private cluster for different users sharing different data & applications, which is generally setup behind a firewall. In private cloud environment no resources are shared with outside agencies or organizations & so multi tenancy does not occur. Private cloud is very specific to the needs of the owing organization & it uses private connection to give almost 100% uptime & dedicated disc space which in turn offers great amount of security.
• Public clouds:
Public cloud is commonly known as external cloud, which offers IT services as a service over the Internet with little or no control over the technology infrastructure it is based on. It reduces complexity & long lead times in testing or deploying new projects as most of the common resources can be shared with other companies with similar objectives. This is alluring to many IT directors as it is cheaper, & offers maximum benefits of sharing IT resources as a service.
• Hybrid clouds:
As name indicates hybrid cloud is combination of both private & public cloud; of course offering benefits of both services. This is an integrated approach, which give some good points from private cloud & some from public cloud. It is highly customizable as per the need of purchasing organizations. Rules and policies are also customized for security & underlying infrastructure. In hybrid cloud environment, activities & tasks are allocated as per the needs to internal as well as external users.
According to deployment options, cloud may be called as internal (Private), external (Public) or hybrid; but it could be still segregated as per the service type or platform on which it is based - Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) & Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).
SaaS cloud allows access to a remote product or e-commerce service over the Internet such as remote CRM (Salesforce) or a data center available on internet (eBooks). Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is intended towards developers who don’t want to get involved in underlying infrastructure & just share applications in cloud (Open source PHP). Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) allows maximum involvement of the underlying server infrastructure to the users - developers which includes deployment back-office applications on that remote environment.
There are further more classifications available for cloud such as community clouds, cloud streams, mobile clouds and federated clouds. All of them however are deployed similarly based on virtualization & concept of centralizing applications & infrastructure on isolated servers and remotely managed and developed different nodes in cloud.
You may choose any type amongst above mentioned clouds, but don’t forget to get most of it by selecting right vendor & to suite best to your business needs.
