The Future of IT is still in the Clouds?

Clouds? yes there are more than one types of clouds in weather watching and in IT

The Cloud has gone beyond the data center and disaster recovery center of 1999 and has also become the catch word for SaaS or Software as a Service. Salesforce.com and Google Docs are tweo prime examples of SaaS.

Clouds are configured into 3 versions:

Public

Private

Hybrid

The public cloud is accessible by everyone that has internet access and Google Docs is a great example. i can create a document on any device and store it on my Google Drive that is located on a storage server somewhere in a Google data center. I can also retrieve that document on any device. Microsoft 365 is another example.

The public cloud service typically houses operations and applications that require elastic scaling (unlimited data bandwidth or storage) and is ideal for short increases or short term bursts in access. 

Private

The private cloud is available to corporate users and can be accessed through  a private VPN service or the corporate WAN. The cloud could be in a corporate data center or hosted by a Cloud provider. Steve needs access to his corporate ERP system from a customer location. He uses the VPN service through the internet to have a secure and private path top the servers in the corporate cloud server that has the ERP system.

The private cloud stores sensitive corporate data, has a firewall for security and is typically virtualized. IT can control and manage the platforms and control data flow on a dedicated infrastructure.

Hybrid

Hybrid clouds are a mixture of both where corporate resources are available only to VPN users but customers can access data through the internet as well. In this case Steve can update the ERP system and coordinate inventory data as a private cloud user and his customer can run dashboards or reports from the same ERP system (they only see what they have been profiled to see) as a public user.

The hybrid cloud can sometimes take the private infrastructure and have a provider virtualize it and provide elasticity in storage and bandwidth needs. This hybrid cloud is a common and standardized infrastructure that has the ability to provide different users access to services or applications as defined by the IT department.

The IT department still has control over how resources are provisioned and what applications are available to public or private users.

There has been numerous studies showing ROI and cost saving benefits to have a cloud service on a data center or application level. Thankfully there are various cloud configurations that can be deployed to serve any IT departments needs.

Caveat: There are many vendors stating "Cloud" when in fact all they are doing is taking your server farm off your premises and placing them in their data center. They then charge for a lot of extras that can increase the cost. There are reasons to do this but it is not a real cloud service. The only difference is that your office users that access the email server in the back room for example, now access it across data circuits to the providers rack space.