What is the cloud? Where is the cloud? Are we in the cloud now? These are all questions you’ve probably heard or even asked yourself. The term “cloud computing” is everywhere.

In the simplest terms, cloud computing means storing and accessing data and programs over the Internet instead of your computer’s hard drive. Although you do not realize you are probably using cloud computing right now, most of us use an online service to send emails, edit documents, watch movies, etc. It is likely that cloud computing is making it all possible behind the scenes. When we speak about cloud computing it’s really necessary to understand the types of cloud computing that customers can adopt and existing. Let’s have a deeper look into this. Generally, there are four types of cloud computing that we can see and listed below,

• Private cloud
• Public cloud
• Hybrid Cloud
• Multi-Cloud

Private Cloud

A private cloud is nothing but the traditional way of delivering service. When a company requires a particular IT function they purchase the supporting products, equipment, installation, configuration and delivering the services to company users. This is the typical way that happens in a private cloud. It provides the most secure, convenient and control over IT infrastructure since all these are individually designed and maintained by you. There is a lot of costs involved in this structure since this is for the dedicated use of a single organization. This model is also known as an internal cloud or corporate cloud.

An example of a private cloud can be, let us consider the scenario that an international bank is expanding its functional role and need the software Oracle FLEXCUBE to be installed and configured. From the bank’s side, they consider the security perspective by not willing to install anywhere else than in their data center. So they purchase a new server, storage system, networking devices and everything as per their needs. This hardware will be installed and configured in their data center and finally, FLEXCUBE will also be installed on this. This is a typical scenario of a private cloud.

Public Cloud

A public cloud is where an independent, third-party provider, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure, Oracle OCI owns and maintains compute resources that customers can access over the internet. Public cloud users share these resources, a model known as a multi-tenant environment. In this scenario, a single resource can be divided into multiple customers and not dedicatedly for a single customer. These are more cost-effective solutions and less administrative headaches for enterprises. Top public cloud providers are Oracle OCI, Microsoft Azure, Amazon web services, Google cloud platform, etc.

Let’s us take an example that you are starting a new business where you need to have high security and compute power to use the applications related to your organization. You won’t be able to build your own data center at a glance due to time consumption, high capital investment, more administrative headaches, etc. The best option here is to have public cloud support to avoid all these issues and expect the best IT infrastructure for your company.

Hybrid Cloud

The hybrid cloud model allows keeping systems in private and another public cloud simultaneously. For example, critical systems that handle sensitive information or can be hosted internally while other systems that do not deal with sensitive data, can be used on a public network.

On the above example(under private cloud), the bank is expanding its operation to another country by opening one or two branches. In this scenario, we may need only very few IT resources to support this infrastructure. Having a complete data center infrastructure is not a good idea since lots of costs are involved, business success is assured, etc. Public cloud adoption is one of the best option to meet this scenario. Since we already know that the bank is having a private cloud data center and adopting service from the public cloud is an addition to their infrastructure. This scenario can be called a hybrid cloud.

A well-built hybrid cloud can meet safe processes that need more care because the private cloud ensures safety through an exclusive network installed in the company. A hybrid cloud can also meet the demands of scalability, for example, when a company needs the extra capacity of a server only during a busy period in particular, and soon after to no longer use most. A hybrid cloud can more easily meet its irregular demand, due to its dynamic scalability. Due to new technological and economic realities, the hybrid cloud model has been the most used in the corporate market.

Multi Cloud

As Cloud technology moves to the mainstream and companies grow more comfortable in their new cloudy world, many businesses recognize that not all Clouds are created equal, and employ multiple Cloud solutions to maximize the benefits they can reap from the technology. Others adopt a Multi Cloud solution to minimize their dependence on any one provider and ensure they’re not locked into a single contract, lest they miss out on some new development from a competing Cloud provider.

Let’s consider the example that Oracle databases are one of the strongest available today and they provide SAAS based public cloud solutions. But in the case of IT infrastructure based Amazon AWS is most affordable to have it. In this case, you can purchase the SAAS product from Oracle and IAAS related services from Amazon AWS. This scenario can be considered a multi cloud environment. Isn’t it making sense to you as well?

Is it Public Cloud then? Or Private? Not necessarily either. A Multi Cloud strategy can employ Public, Private or Hybrid Cloud solutions, depending on the needs of individual companies. Basically, organizations relying on a Multi Cloud solution may be using Hybrid Cloud – in many cases, they are – but Multi Cloud does not automatically mean they must be using Hybrid.

Isn’t Hybrid Cloud Automatically Multi-Cloud? Nope. Hybrid Cloud refers to the strategy of using any two types of Cloud or hosting infrastructure in a single organization. Some Hybrid Cloud solutions use Public and Private Cloud to gain power and scalability while maintaining security. Some may use colocation servers to address redundancy and stability concerns. Other hybrid solutions may leverage dedicated servers for customized performance – the beauty of hybrid is that there are many combinations to choose from, meaning every company can find a solution that meets their specific needs.

Still sounds like Multi Cloud to you? Remember, a Multi Cloud solution is one where different Clouds from different providers are used for separate tasks. Hybrid Cloud is more like creating a solution that uses more than one Cloud or server option to perform a task that accesses both. One could say that in a Hybrid environment, the data gets intermingled between two different hosting infrastructure types, while in Multi Cloud, you are simply using multiple Clouds.

Community Cloud

Last but not least is a community cloud. I know that this is not listed above since this is no so adopted by companies. But let’s have a consideration and understanding of this model too. The community cloud service shares among various organizations and companies which belong to the same community with common concerns. This can manage either by the third party or internally.

Let me explain to you the same with an example. There are organizations that require the application, which is available at one set of cloud servers. So, the company which is allowing multiple servers will not provide a particular server in the cloud. But they will allow multiple customers to connect to the cloud and segment their sessions. In this, the customer will use the same hardware the other customers are using. It simply means that servers are using the same application which makes it a community cloud.

Organizations having similar computing concerns and have shared interests can share it. This type of cloud computing is best compatible with ventures, business organizations, research organizations, and tenders. This benefits the user of the community cloud to know and analyze the business demand first. The presence of the community cloud can be either onsite or offsite.

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