What is the Cloud Anyway?

In the IT industry, buzz words and trends come and go with alarming frequency. On occasion, a trend will come along with the staying power to reshape our thinking. It’s difficult today to read any tech industry news without hearing about “clouds” or virtualization. The ambiguous and often interchangeable definition of these terms can often be a source of confusion for IT decision makers in the SMB market.

It seems no one can agree on what the cloud is or isn’t. There are in fact several types of cloud computing models. The three most popular are….

• Public Cloud – The most common model that people think of when discussing cloud computing. Services provided in the public cloud are hosted by a third party and accessed over the internet, generally via a web browser.

• Private Cloud – A term given to the deployment of cloud-like services on a private network. This is usually accomplished via server and application virtualization.

• Hybrid Cloud – An environment that consists of services provided by both the public and private cloud.

Hybrid clouds are likely to become the standard for the SMB market. The integration of public cloud scalability and on-demand resource allocation with private cloud security and availability will be hard to resist.

As cloud services evolve and mature, we’ll see a decreased reliance on a “one for one” server-application relationship and an increase of shared-computing power, dynamic resource allocation and multi-tenant design.

In the coming months we’ll be taking a closer look at how each of these models can benefit your organization and what factors should be considered as the expansion of cloud computing continues.

To learn more about how Thrive’s Virtualization Solutions can help your business, please click here.

Next month: Virtualization, the private cloud.

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