The selection of a public or private cloud depends on a number of factors. Companies must look at the specific applications and processes they want to transition to a cloud-based infrastructure and factor in security, compliance, cost and scalability before deciding
Security
The primary consideration for any business when choosing a cloud solution is security. Access to the cloud can be actively restricted internally and externally with private cloud deployment. If your organization has to be compliant with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and/or Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance requirements, you may want to choose a private cloud to process or store sensitive documents. The firewall technologies can be implemented here to protect against any external threats.
It is also wise to check the service provider’s profile and history, and obtaining reference customers in their industry before the transition.
Budget
If the organization is a large one with a bigger budget, it might be cheaper to invest in a private cloud to run long term projects. It can be cost-prohibitive for small and mid-sized businesses because of initial hardware costs, but large organizations have the advantage of using their existing data center hardware for cloud hosting. A complete control over security, compliance, hardware, virtual servers, failover algorithms and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) would be possible.
Hardware and virtual server control
Software as a Service (SaaS) users and Platform as a Service (PaaS) developers have no control over hardware and virtual hardware servers; the only control a SaaS user has, is to access a SaaS application. PaaS developers have control over the SaaS application life cycle; they decide what stress testing methodology to use and what operating system to run on the platform. Only the provider has control over hardware and virtual servers. If complete control over hardware and virtual servers is required, a private cloud is the best option.
Failover Control
Using a private cloud, complete control over a failover plan can be practiced to ensure the cloud service will be available to users. You can specify which healthy servers can automatically take over when a server’s connection falls, or when the server experiences sudden loading spikes. You can test your failover algorithms in different scenarios to make sure they will work properly when the server begins to fail.
SLA management
A private cloud helps an organization have complete control over SLA management. Your business can see how direct and indirect SLAs are related and what metrics are used in each SLA to measure service availability at given points of time.
Scalability
Scalability must also be considered. Private cloud solutions are scalable enough to fit businesses of all sizes and who often have dynamic and unpredictable IT resource requirements. It not only makes it easy and cost effective for companies to scale their cloud storage requirements up or down but it also provides convenient chargeback tools to accurately calculate IT data usage.
When considering the transition to virtual servers, companies must prioritize their needs in terms of scalability, cost, security and flexibility and then make an informed decision regarding the best fit.
