What are the Pros and Cons of a Private vs Public Cloud?
The major benefits of using a public cloud are that it:
- Turns acquiring resources into a variable per unit cost acquisition proposition, i.e., like acquiring utility services.
- Gives you the flexibility of acquiring resource as and when needed.
- Provides ability to scale the resources, both up and down very quickly in response to business needs.
- Eliminates the need for capital expenditures.
- Dramatically reduces the time for acquisition and provisioning of resource.
- Reduces infrastructure cost by taking advantage of the size and scale.
From these benefits that public clouds offer, especially the last one, i.e., leveraging the size and scale through consolidation to reduce costs, is really the only one available through private clouds. And, the costs can be quite prohibitive to build flexibility, scalability and agility into ta private cloud.
An additional reason why organizations have been using private clouds is for the purpose of security. As the security tools in the public clouds have matured, organizations are hard pressed to justify private cloud based on security as well as governance compliance.
For example, AWS has now a very rich security tool, provisions and certifications. Even US Intelligence and Department of Defense (DoD) community have set up initiatives to migrate away from private cloud and take full advantage of public cloud, of course, only after implementing proper security governance and compliance. See CIA’S AMAZON CLOUD GOES LIVE—FIREWALLED AND PRIVATE.