When you hear cloud computing, what comes to your mind? Like the clouds in the sky, cloud computing is quite vast. In simple words, cloud computing is the delivery of a variety of computing services via the Internet. These computing services can include databases, analytics, storage, machine learning, and among many other things. 

Below is a quick guide for understanding the different types of cloud computing.

Types Of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is divided into four main types: public clouds, private clouds, hybrid clouds, and multi-clouds. Caution must be taken when choosing a type of cloud because switching among them can be a monumental lift. Additionally, each cloud type is designed for different use cases, and even if two clouds are of the same type, they’ll likely still be configured differently. 

Public Clouds: Public clouds are virtual resources developed from hardware. It is owned and managed or operated by cloud service providers and automatically allocated or shared amongst multiple tenants through the Internet. Management, resource allocation, and user agreements are the unique features that make this cloud public. Some of the most popular and largest Public cloud providers include Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services ( AWS), IBM Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Many startups and new products take advantage of public clouds to easily scale their technology.

Private Clouds: Private clouds reside within a company’s own infrastructure. The difference between private and public clouds is that with private clouds, the burden of infrastructure maintenance and security is the responsibility of the company. Additionally, while public clouds can be shared by multiple tenants, private clouds stay private. In other words, access to the private clouds is often restricted to a single organization. Even though a private cloud is harder to set up and maintain, bigger organizations often find themselves using private clouds to comply with compliance and data laws.

Hybrid Clouds: Hybrid clouds combine both public and private clouds. Hybrid clouds incorporate management, portability, and orchestration across two or more organizations or departments within the organization. These environments may have two or more private clouds, two or more public clouds, one private and one public cloud, or a virtual environment with at least one private or public cloud.

Multi-Clouds: Multi-clouds are cloud services made from more than one cloud service or more than one cloud service provider, private or public. Multi-cloud environments tend to eliminate reliance on a single cloud service provider by distributing software, cloud assets, applications, and many more across different cloud environments. Multi-clouds de-risk your organization and can help determine a preferred cloud vendor.

The Bottom Line

Cloud computing has taken the world by storm. It has proven to be important repeatedly for numerous reasons, including flexibility, data recovery, increased security, automatic software updates, and easy access. If your organization is not on the cloud, what are you waiting for? Connect with Uplancer today for a free consultation on whether public, private, hybrid, or multi-cloud is the right solution for you! We can also audit your cloud infrastructure for opportunities for cost optimization.