Private vs. Public Cloud: Which is the next big thing?

As business has become global in the true sense with virtually no boundaries, it has become all the more important for today’s enterprises to have their operations running 24 X 7. It has become imperative to venture into the emerging economies, like India. Exploring the Indian cloud landscape by small, medium and large enterprises in the overall cloud ecosystem provides more opportunities for the cloud computing services in India.

 

Introduction

Today ‘cloud computing’ is considered to be the newest buzzword in the world of Internet and computing technologies. Cloud Computing is a paradigm shift in the way IT is consumed and provided by vendors to customers. Cloud computing customers do not own the physical infrastructure but instead to avoid capital expenditure can rent usage from a third-party provider. They consume resources as a service and pay only for resources that they use. Consumption is usually billed on a utility (e.g., resources consumed, like electricity) or subscription (e.g., time-based, like a newspaper) basis with little or no upfront cost.

Considering the dynamics at which Indian economy is growing, the demand for application platforms, comprehensive virtualized solutions and integrated management offerings will become the key areas of focus while providing cloud computing service in India.

Companies like IBM, Netmagic, Reliance and many System Integrators like Wipro, TCS and Infosys are taking steps toward making cloud computing services available in India. Many global players like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, VMware, and Salesforce.com are considering major investments in next couple of years. HP and Microsoft have signed an agreement (Jan 13th 2010) to invest $250 million in next three years to significantly simplify technology environments via cloud computing.

As business has become global in the true sense with virtually no boundaries, it has become all the more important for today’s enterprises to have their operations running 24 X 7. Even a few minutes downtime can result in losses worth millions.

Cloud computing is an on-demand service model for IT provision, and it is based on virtualization and distributed computing technologies. Cloud computing architectures have:

• 
  highly abstracted resources
• instant scalability and flexibility
• near instantaneous provisioning
• shared resources (hardware, database, memory, etc)
• ‘service on demand’, usually with a ‘pay as you go’ billing system
• Programmatic management (ex, through WS API)

Private vs Public

Public Cloud: The cloud infrastructure is made available to the general public or a large industry group and is owned by an organization selling cloud services. These deliver the best economies of scale, but their shared infrastructure model can limit configuration, security, and SLA specificity, making them a less-than-ideal fit for services using sensitive data that is subject to compliancy or safe harbor regulations.

Private Cloud: The cloud infrastructure is operated solely for an organization. It may be managed by the organization or a third party and may exist on premise or off premise.

Hybrid Cloud: The cloud infrastructure is a composition of two or more clouds (private and public) that remain unique entities but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting for load-balancing between clouds).

 

Effects of Cloud Computing Deployment Models

• small enterprises use public clouds and can minimize the growth of datacenters in India
• laverage enterprises datacenters can evolve as private clouds 
• medium and large enterprises in India can also use hybrid cloud infrastructure software to leverage both internal and public clouds
• public clouds may adopt standards in order to run workloads from competing hybrid cloud infrastructure

 

When it comes to the distinction between public and private cloud the lines are starting to blur as most of the companies trying to figure out where they want to use each type of cloud computing platform.

eProbe Research concluded a recent survey conducted across 1500 companies in India and we found that most companies in India are still investigating the various forms of cloud computing.

PUBLIC CLOUD	PRIVATE CLOUD
1. Internet facing	1. Intranet facing
2. Pay per use mode	2. One time cost
3. Non critical applications are being used	3. Critical applications are used
4. Less secure	4. More secure
5. Slower (less bandwidth)	5. Faster (higher bandwidth)
6. No in-house IT staff	6. Dedicated IT staff
7. Highly scalable	7. Scalability constraints
8. Less control on SLA's	8. More control and tighter SLA's
9. Shared infrastructure model	9. Owned exclusively by an organization
10. Key examples: Google, Microsoft, and Amazon EC2	10. Key examples: eBay, Wipro, and Cognizant

 

The budgets being allocated for cloud computing in 2011 is on average and not all that substantial. The average amount spent by small companies was around $900 per annum while medium sized businesses spent almost $2000 per year, large enterprises spent around $4900 per annum and very large enterprise spent around $3600 per annum.

Currently, most of the large enterprises in India prefer private clouds. The public cloud is mostly aimed at the consumer and small businesses. In India public cloud market penetration currently is at 70%, private cloud is at 24% and hybrid Cloud at 6%.

The enterprise adoption of private cloud will accelerate over the next five years and will boost opportunity for third party data center outsourcing. Emerging strategies for enterprise data centers demonstrate private cloud will be fastest growing segment in the enterprise market. However migrating to cloud services represents a new way of operating and will require a change in the mindset by enterprise IT leaders.

This content was provided by eprobe Research Private Limited. Visit their website at www.eproberesearch.com.