Public Clouds:

These are based on shared physical hardware which is owned and operated by a third-party provider. Public clouds are ideal for small and medium sized businesses or businesses that have fluctuating demands. The primary benefits of the public cloud include the speed with which you can deploy IT resources and the ability to pay only of the server resources you use. By spreading infrastructure costs across a number of users, each can take advantage of a low-cost, pay-as-you-go approach to IT provisioning. And, due to the sheer size of public clouds, you can scale compute power up and down as business demands, within a matter of minutes.

Private and Dedicated Clouds:

A private cloud is infrastructure dedicated entirely to your business that’s hosted either on-site or in a service provider’s data center. The private cloud delivers all the agility, scalability and efficiency of the public cloud, but also provides greater levels of control and security, making it ideal for larger businesses or those with strict data, regulation and governance obligations. Another key benefit of private cloud is the ability to customize the compute, storage and networking components to best suit your specific IT requirements — something that cannot be achieved so easily in the public cloud environment.

Hybrid cloud — Getting the Best of Both Worlds

Getting the right cloud solution no longer needs to be a choice of public or private. With the hybrid cloud you get the best of both.

The hybrid cloud allows you to combine public cloud with private cloud or dedicated hosting and leverage the best of what each has to offer to meet your needs. Use the public cloud for non-sensitive operations, the private cloud for business-critical operations, and incorporate any existing dedicated resources to achieve a highly flexible, highly agile and highly cost-effective solution.

Capabilities	Public Cloud	Private Cloud	Dedicated Cloud	Hybrid Cloud
Description	Multi-tenant environment with pay-as-you-grow scalability	Scalability plus the enhanced security and control of a single-tenant environment	For predictable workloads that require enhanced security and control	Connect the public cloud to your private cloud or dedicated servers — even in your own data center
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Physical hardware	Shared	Dedicated	Dedicated	Shared + Dedicated
Best for	Non-sensitive, public-facing operations and unpredictable traffic	Sensitive, business-critical operations	Sensitive, business-critical operations, plus demanding performance, security and compliance requirements	Combine public, private and/or dedicated servers, for the best of each
Scalable
Low cost, utility billing
Flexible
Customizable
High Performance
Enhanced security and control
Predictable cost
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Still Undecided About Which Approach Is Right For You?

Contact us to learn more about the performance differences between the solutions.

And consider the following when choosing between solutions or a combination of the two:

• Current usage patterns
• Which applications you’re moving to the cloud
• Required service levels
• Regulatory issues