When

establishing an organization, it can take months – even years – to determine everything from the business location, to the company name and logo, staffing needs and more. Despite the similarities of organizations within an industry, there are always differentiators as no two companies will ever be exactly alike. 

This is not a novel concept, yet we still hear of businesses today accepting a cookie cutter cloud model under the guise that it will save them time and/or money. In actuality, a blanket cloud strategy or infrastructure can leave businesses restricted to the confines of the predetermined system and ultimately paying more to make adjustments to meet their needs. 

IT decision makers should seek a customizable cloud model to meet their unique business needs and challenges. In order to do so, it is important to first understand the intricacies of each cloud model to decide if a private, public or hybrid cloud model will yield the greatest benefits for an organization. 

 
Below is a snapshot of each cloud approach and key considerations when exploring your options: 

Private Cloud 

• What is it? A private cloud model enables corporate IT departments to deploy a dedicated cloud node on-premise and extend the suite of cloud services to their end-users through a self-managed control panel. An increasingly popular alternative to private cloud comes in the form of a “hosted” private cloud in which an IT department opts to deploy a private cloud node with a third-party hosting provider.  
• What are the advantages? Private cloud offers companies advantages such as self service capabilities, scalable compute, and consumption based billing, as well as the security of a dedicated, self-managed environment. The private cloud model continues to persevere as businesses have large existing investments in technology, people and processes that cannot be shifted easily.  
• What are the shortcomings? The private cloud model is not as agile as the public or hybrid models and can experience during network/data processing spikes. There are also costs associated with dedicated capex.

Public Cloud

• What is it? To implement a public cloud model, a business will utilize an open, shared set of resources, such as a managed cloud third-party service provider to store/run applications and data virtually. 
• What are the advantages? These services are typically very elastic and scalable, enabling a business to tap significant resources on-demand in a relatively cost effective manner versus building their own environments to accommodate maximum usage.  
• What are the shortcomings? Common drawbacks associated with many public cloud services are concerns with limited service level agreements (SLAs) around tenancy, isolation and performance. This model can also be unreliable, resulting in inconvenient outages. 

Hybrid Cloud

• What is it? The term “hybrid cloud” is used to discuss the mix or use of both internal and external cloud solutions (public and private cloud) where a business decides the most appropriate “cloud” to support specific IT workloads. 
• What are the advantages? This model enables IT departments to more effectively address the disparate needs of their user communities without many of the risks associated with the public cloud.  As with most technology-adoption curves, businesses ultimately prefer a pragmatic approach that provides them the confidence to migrate production environments to this new model.
• What are the shortcomings? Historically, this model has been viewed as somewhat complex as it is necessary to seamlessly merge two environments; however technology maturation is mitigating these challenges. Additionally, concerns have been expressed around the security of this model as data travels between environments. 

As with all aspects of business, it is imperative for organizations to seek an individualized, custom cloud solution to ensure they can reap the full benefits of cloud. At Navisite, we serve as a partner to our clients throughout the cloud decision journey and offer a number of customizable options to support organizations across a broad range of industries. Reach out to us to receive a custom report that explains your Cloud Profile and some ideas for making your next move in the cloud.