Valuable lessons have been learnt about cloud deployments over the last decade. Most significantly, while both public and private options have their strengths, they have important differences that must be taken into consideration when assessing providers. To make the most beneficial investment, a decision maker must understand the pros and cons of each approach and determine what’s right for their own specific infrastructure, applications, customers – and budget.

However, with so many solutions on offer, it’s a confusing marketplace to evaluate. Having an appreciation of why public and private clouds differ, and the key points to take into account when choosing between them, will help senior executives make an informed decision.

Firstly, not all clouds are equal

Public clouds are run by third party vendors who maintain the supporting hardware, including servers, network, and storage. They deliver virtual infrastructures to multiple customers and each manages their own discrete virtual environment, sharing the underlying physical resources with other customers. But not all clouds are equal. Within this multi-tenant category, there are varying levels of service, performance, security, and pricing methods to choose from.

Whereas, private clouds supplied by external providers do not share hardware or resources with other organisations. Each customer is a sole tenant, working independently. Separation from other systems makes a private cloud inherently more secure than a shared option. Robust authentication and security measures can also be put in place by the customer, minimising the risk of unauthorised access or data breaches. Therefore, it is particularly well-suited to handling sensitive and confidential information, such as personal data, medical records, intellectual property, and other critical data.

Pros and cons of a private cloud

On the positive side, private clouds can be engineered to dovetail precisely with customer needs, ensuring the most appropriate technology stack is deployed. Moreover, hardware and software can be configured for optimal performance and tweaked easily to meet changing demands.

Greater control over technology decisions and capacity helps to ensure costs remain stable, in contrast to fluctuating usage-based pricing, typical of public clouds. This means accurate and reliable calculations can be extrapolated from a fixed infrastructure investment, giving more confidence in projected costings.

Predictability is particularly useful for organisations needing a high level of financial stability when budgeting and planning for future business infrastructure requirements. For some, it’s an advantage over a usage-based model if costs can go up with only a short notice period, leaving customers with escalating outgoings and tied-in to a particular supplier.

Flexibility is another benefit of private clouds. For example, supplementary managed services such as maintenance, monitoring, and troubleshooting, can be brought in to reduce the administrative burden on internal staff. Organisations can also continue to run vital legacy applications that wouldn’t easily migrate to public clouds, or set-up high-performance computing for specialised work such as technical modelling and simulations.

For increasingly regulated industries, private clouds can help provide stringent adherence to compliance requirements. Having autonomy within a dedicated environment also facilitates the enforcement of appropriate security measures, access control, data protection, privacy, backup, and recovery.

As such, private clouds can provide maximum control and tailored security, but on the downside, they can be expensive to establish and very difficult to scale.

Why choose a public cloud

Public clouds, on the other hand, usually offer cost-effective and responsive levels of scalability. Organisations can increase or decrease their demand for resources easily whenever the need for additional computing power or storage arises. Ideal for accommodating unforeseen circumstances, expansion, or consolidation. And, a good fit for web applications, APIs, content delivery networks, collaboration tools, big data and analytics. Also, user-friendly interfaces make it simple to spin up temporary environments for development, testing and prototyping. Service level agreements give added reassurance of reliability and performance, often guaranteeing 99.9% uptime for all instances.

Cost can be a significant factor, making a public cloud an attractive option. Flexible subscription models with hour or monthly billing removes the financial burden of upfront investment. This stacks up well against hyperscalers, delivering up to 30% reduction in costs based on standard workload benchmarks, although actual savings depend on specific use cases.

Public clouds by their nature are generic offerings, but this doesn’t mean they won’t provide adequate compliance and security measures. The caveat is that customers must evaluate whether they are sufficient to meet their own governance commitments and external regulations. It’s a case of picking the most suitable solution from the myriad available.

Or, it could make sense to take the hybrid route.

Going the hybrid route

A hybrid model potentially offers the best of both worlds, providing the scalability and computing power of a public cloud along with the security and control of a private infrastructure. Having access to a modern public cloud also allows organisations to evaluate and take advantage of emerging technologies such as AI and machine learning, as well as services like big data analytics. With minimal upfront investment and allocation of internal resources, this helps organisations to stay agile while not compromising the security of sensitive data which can remain in the safe confines of a private cloud.

For many, cloud computing has brought substantial efficiency and performance gains over the last decade. But it hasn’t been all plain sailing as organisations have had to wise up to the pitfalls of choosing the wrong model or provider. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, decision makers are in a strong position to pick the right option and the right supplier, if they do their homework. This should ensure the majority have enough knowledge to cut through the jargon and hype to work out what’s best for their organisation’s unique requirements.

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