There is a lot of talk about cloud services nowadays and a lot of our customers have asked us what the difference is between these cloud services that carriers and other parties have to offer. To make it a bit less complicated, below is a breakdown of the three versions of cloud solutions that are on the market: Enterprise cloud, Private cloud and Public cloud.
Enterprise Cloud is a multitenant virtual server environment where computing (CPU cores and RAM), storage and network resources are shared among multiple customers with dedicated resource pools that are securely allocated to customers. The virtualization gives you build in redundancy, so if a hard drive or a piece of RAM fails, it is not going to affect service. Even though the Enterprise Cloud is multitenant, the resources are dedicated. So if a customer let’s say has an enterprise cloud solution with 10 cores, 20 Gigs of RAM and 100 gigs of storage – then these resources are always available for this customer.
The Private Cloud takes this one step further by also dedicating hardware for use by a single organization. A private cloud customer gets his own cabinet, switches etc. and is able to run their own virtualization. This can be particularly important for organizations that have some sort of compliance like HIPPA or PCI that dictates that they can’t be in a multi-tenant environment.
And - to complicate things even more - there is the Hybrid Cloud, which is a combination of enterprise and private cloud. The hybrid cloud can be useful for software that does not run very well in a virtualized environment. Oracle is a good example of such software. With a hybrid solution, a physical private server is set up in the same facility as where the enterprise or private cloud hardware is located.
Public cloud services like Amazon EC2/AWS do not offer dedicated computing resources and have a usage based pricing whereas Enterprise and private cloud solutions have a fixed monthly cost. They also don’t offer any MPLS VPN support, are not fully managed, and usually don’t offer VMware vCloud Director.
Many Enterprise and Private Cloud solutions are hosted in Equinix’s SAS-70 & SSAE-16 compliant datacenter with the ability to support a customer’s private IP addressing.
If you would like to learn more about the different cloud solutions in the market, we have a team of experts on staff that can help you design and/or price a cloud solution for our company.