What is the technical difference between a public and private cloud?
A public cloud is one where anybody can sign up over the internet & start using the cloud services & resources. This requires zero upfront capital expense & is usually billed as per the use without long-term commitments.
A private cloud requires a lot of upfront capital expense and can be restricted to a particular set of people or company. It can also be configured as an extension of your existing corporate LAN. Optionally, you can restrict internet access to your private cloud so that only your corporate network is able to connect to it.
A private cloud, because it functions independently for an organization and that too behind firewall settings does prove to be accessible. By stating this, we mean that a private cloud cannot be accessed from anywhere and at any point of time. It is completely managed by the users working for an organization.
As far as the scalability factor is concerned, private cloud gives scalable business environment. It also offers flexibility to expand as per users’ requirement. Public is more viable than private cloud, let us check on few points:
Public Cloud architecture is built with the view to create an accessible business environment that can be shared and accessed from anywhere and at any time of the hour. Even though, it poses security risks, public cloud is considered more useful than its counterpart because of several reasons
Public Clouds
Public clouds are owned and operated by third-party service providers. Customers benefit from economies of scale because infrastructure costs are spread across all users, thus allowing each individual client to operate on a low-cost, “pay-as-you-go” model. Another advantage of public cloud infrastructures is that they are typically larger in scale than an in-house enterprise cloud, which provides clients with seamless, on-demand scalability.
It is also important to note that all customers on public clouds share the same infrastructure pool with limited configurations, security protections and availability variances, as these factors are wholly managed and supported by the service provider.
rivate Cloud
Private clouds are those that are built exclusively for an individual enterprise. They allow the firm to host applications in the cloud, while addressing concerns regarding data security and control, which is often lacking in a public cloud environment. There are two variations of private clouds:
On-Premise Private Cloud: This format, also known as an “internal cloud,” is hosted within an organization’s own data center. It provides a more standardized process and protection, but is often limited in size and scalability. Also, a firm’s IT department would incur the capital and operational costs for the physical resources with this model. On-premise private clouds are best used for applications that require complete control and configurability of the infrastructure and security.
Externally-Hosted Private Cloud: This private cloud model is hosted by an external cloud computing provider (such as Eze Castle Integration). The service provider facilitates an exclusive cloud environment with full guarantee of privacy. This format is recommended for organizations that prefer not to use a public cloud infrastructure due to the risks associated with the sharing of physical resources.
Public-cloud solutions are managed by service providers and Enterprises can build private clouds within their own data centers by running applications on virtual servers that may reside on any number of available physical machines.