By now, you’ve no doubt heard all about public clouds — those cast-in-concrete, one-size fits-all services to the general public or a large industry group. This is what many people think of as Cloud Computing — a monolith.
But Cloud Computing is far from monolithic. In fact there are many types of Clouds. Here I’m focusing on the three major approaches to Cloud Computing …
Public cloud services don’t cost much, but you pay in other ways: Little or no control over where your data resides, or how it’s transmitted, or how it’s secured. And take-it-or-leave-it service-level agreements that aren’t negotiable and do not ensure high availability or reliability. Those dark tales of compromised security and extended downtimes come from public clouds.
Then there are private clouds . These are the ones you do yourself solely for your own use. A private cloud is, in effect, an on-demand, resource-pooling data center customized to the needs of the corporation it serves. When you go for a private cloud, you take on all the hassles and headaches of understanding, designing, testing, and deploying not just some new apps, but a whole new IT infrastructure unlike anything you have now. That means all the CapEx, all the struggles to get the right people with the right expertise, all the project delays, all the sleepless nights …
And then there’s what we call Shape-Your-Own Clouds. These combine — and take advantage of — the best of public and private clouds …
In my next blog, I’ll zero in on Shape-Your-Own Clouds.
