When you hear about cloud computing, what comes to your mind? You might have some ideas, but it is a vast topic to discuss, so here is a guide that will give you an understanding of what “Cloud” means. In simple words, cloud computing is the delivery of a variety of computing services via the internet. These computing services can include database, analytics, storage, machine learning among many others.
Types Of Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is divided into four main types: public clouds, private clouds, hybrid clouds, and multi-clouds. Choosing a cloud computing service is a decision one must be careful with because each cloud service is used to solve different problems, and even if two clouds are of the same type, they still have their unique features.
Public Clouds
Public clouds are virtual resources developed from hardware. It is owned and managed or operated by a provider 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.
Private Clouds
Private clouds reside on a company’s own infrastructure. The difference between Private and Public clouds is that with Private cloud, the burden of infrastructure maintenance and security falls on the company. While Public clouds can be shared by multiple tenants, private clouds, by its very definition, stay private. What this means is that the 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 because of compliance and data laws.
Hybrid Clouds
Hybrid clouds are clouds that run applications combining 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.
Cloud computing has taken the world by storm. It has proven its importance repeatedly for numerous reasons, including flexibility, data recovery, increased security, automatic software update, and easy access. Hence, if you are not yet on cloud, what are you waiting for?
