Due to its increased benefits, both small and medium businesses are increasingly leveraging the cloud. And just like most other business resources, the cloud comes in different forms to suit various business needs. The two major types are: Public Cloud Private Cloud The Public Cloud (for instance DropBox) is of course, the most widely known […]
Due to its increased benefits, both small and medium businesses are increasingly leveraging the cloud. And just like most other business resources, the cloud comes in different forms to suit various business needs. The two major types are:
The Public Cloud (for instance DropBox) is of course, the most widely known and used especially because it’s largely available to all types of businesses and the general public. The public cloud enterprise servers come with three types of services, available in free and paid versions – Software as a Service (Saas), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
The Private Cloud on the other hand, uses in-house servers set up by an organization’s IT department for internal corporate customers. This scenario is particularly appealing to businesses which want to entirely control their cloud resources without relying on third party entities.
According to a private cloud infographic put together by Microsoft, most small and medium enterprises usually begin leveraging the cloud at the public level, and subsequently shift to private. Through a survey they conducted, Microsoft further found out that 41% of senior executives in various organizations are planning to move to the private cloud by the year 2015. This trend is ultimately expected to significantly boost the industry, earning the private enterprise servers a revenue $5,881,900,000 by the end of the year.
Info-graphic Courtesy: Microsoft
So, what exactly is so inviting about the private cloud? Why should small and medium businesses focus on it as opposed to the public cloud?
Increased Security
It’s no secret that large public cloud service providers have dominated the headlines severally due to security breaches. Companies like GoGrid , Amazon Cloud Service and Dropbox are consistently getting attacked by malicious hackers for info, consequently negatively impacting businesses which rely on them.
According to a report by the Government Information Group, corporations that are critically protective of their data security have been keenly following these developments- and many are shying away from the public cloud. They do this to shield themselves from the risk of compromising their businesses in case security breaches occur in the public cloud servers. Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder even echoed his counterparts’ sentiments on this by expressing fear of uploading all the data to the cloud.
While you may argue that private cloud servers also face similar security threats, they are much safer since they are small scale- and therefore face significantly lesser threats. Additionally, there are many effectual security techniques like dedicated leased lines, which are only implementable on private cloud- to keep the data out of the reach of prying eyes.
More Control
As an entrepreneur, you’d want exclusive ability to control all the entities in your business, including data- and that’s what you get from a private cloud. Contrary to the public cloud where access and data flow is controlled by third parties, the private cloud hands you complete control over all the programs. With that, you’ll be able to monitor all the activities and facilitate the flow of data and traffic according to the jurisdiction of different departments and organizational objectives. Ultimately, this allows you to dictate your organizational goals and subsequently steer the cloud resources in line with them. Additionally, complete control allows you to implement critical metrics tailored to your business- and consequently give you the upper edge against your competitors, as you track the KPIs and adjust the organizational strategies according to the resultant reports.
Greater Reliability
Most public cloud servers have implemented protocols on users to protect themselves against resultant legal action in case data is lost. Additionally, you are not guaranteed constant access to your data and other cloud resources, which makes this option considerably unreliable. In fact, a significant number of businesses are severely compromised when network failures occur. Private cloud servers on the other hand, come with increasingly fault-tolerant network backbones and predictable service availability- which make them more reliable and resistant to network problems.
Scalability
Although public cloud servers are considered scalable and flexible, they have limited capabilities, dictated by third party providers according to their resources and the common market needs. Private clouds on the other hand, are limitless- they can be scaled to shift or increase the workloads across different servers and resources to streamline the operations according to fluid organizational objectives. If you are expanding your business for instance, all you have to do is increase your hardware and software capabilities without seeking consent from a third party service provider. If you have special network needs on the other hand, your private cloud can be adjusted accordingly, as opposed to the frustrations you’d get from public cloud providers, who of course wouldn’t adjust their servers to respond to a single subscriber.
Performance
Due to increasingly expanding data networks, 93% of organizations are planning to upgrade their cloud resources to improve their performance through resource optimization. Small and medium businesses are particularly keen on performance because of the constant need to expand according to organizational growth and market trends.
The performance of the public cloud is fairly efficacious, but it cannot match up to the private cloud. The enhanced performance is largely due to extensively automated components and scalability, which allows businesses to tune up their infrastructure according to desired performance levels. The performance of public cloud infrastructure on the other hand, depends on the commitment of third party service providers in upgrading their systems and allocating resources. This consequently downplays your business’ expansion potential.
Pricing
The total cost of ownership consists of infrastructure cost and price paid for the private cloud solution. Most private cloud solution such as FileCloud are less resource intensive and can be deployed on existing servers, thus avoiding any new server costs. The pricing of a private cloud solution varies and some solutions like FileCloud costs only a fraction of what a public cloud solution would cost. For a 100-user installation running for four years, FileCloud would save over $40K when compared to a similar public cloud solution like ‘Dropbox For Business’. In addition to pricing, here are the top 10 Reasons why FileCloud is a great private Dropbox alternative.
Click the following link to compare major private and public cloud solutions, click here to learn more.
It’s therefore safe to conclude that private cloud has a significant edge over public cloud especially when it comes to small and medium businesses. Although it would require a bit more time and effort to set up and get it off the ground, private cloud is a worthwhile investment with significantly high ROI.
Author: Davis Porter
Image Courtesy: KROMKRATHOG / freedigitalphotos.net
