8. What are the Different Types of Clouds?

There are currently 3 distinct models of cloud computing that each carry with them their advantages and disadvantages.


Public Cloud - Companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Rackspace are examples of Public cloud.

• The pro for adopting public cloud services is no up-front costs, minimal monthly costs, high quality of service, and seamless integration for end users.
• The biggest con would be security. Companies with highly sensitive information would rather not expose that information to a public service, even though the provider may be trustworthy.

Private Cloud - Companies choosing to go the way of the private cloud have to build the cloud for themselves. This makes sense for large multinational organizations that may require the peace of mind of know their data, and applications are never stored or held outside of the organization.

• The only real pro here is security. If you trust your staff today, you are simply going to continue to trust them that they will not compromise your data's security, and integrity.
• Con - extraordinarily expensive. Imagine the laundry list within the recipe for BuyIT.com multiplied many times over. This is mainly the approach for an organization that already has significant infrastructure, but is going to try to realize some of the benefits of SaaS running out of their own Infrastructure.

Hybrid Cloud - As you might imagine, this options is a mix of both the former and the latter options. Companies like Redhat and VMware are leading the market in solutions to tie together public and private cloud offerings in seamless fashion.

• The pro is to realize some of the cost savings benefits of SaaS over the public cloud. While choosing which data or applications are so sensitive that you need to keep them in house.