Public vs Private Cloud, which Right for Your Business?

Public vs private cloud, which is better?  Everyone is either using cloud or will be in the next few years.  Sooner or later, everyone will need to decide if they should use either a private cloud or a public cloud to hold all their data and information.  

Clouds come in 3 varies, Public, Private, and Hybrid.  Private clouds are dedicated to your business and no other person or company will have their virtual servers on your dedicated hardware.  Private clouds could be either on your premise or outsourced.  Public Clouds are the opposite.  The hardware is shared across multiple customers and your virtual servers will share CPU, Memory, Disk, and Network resources with other companies.  Hybrid clouds are just a mix of the 2 where some of your virtual servers are using shared servers and some are using dedicated.

Cloud can be used either for your business or personal data.  Today that answer is rather simple.  Public cloud offers more features and is pretty inexpensive compared to private clouds but the real expense is in what you don’t see in your monthly business expenses.

The Risks of Using Public Clouds!

I feel people and companies are willing to take on more risk when building a public cloud.  If you are hosting with a large company, you trust them to secure and provide stable services.  Often you don’t even ask how they are providing it.  Knowing how the cloud works is critical BEFORE you think about moving to it.  This cloud is holding your data and in some cases your business’s future.  Nothing should be moved beyond your control.  No one will take care of your data better than you.  Trusting someone else to do it adds risk to your business and your data.

On the other hand, technology is getting so advanced that keeping up with everything is almost impossible.  Outsourcing that work to a cloud expert would save you a lot of time and effort.  If I move my data (website, applications, data files) to the cloud, I need to know it is being protected and hiring an expert to manage access will be better than trying to do it myself.

So Here’s the Problem

I am not able to secure my data well enough and I am not sure trusting someone else is the best solution either.  How to I put my data in the cloud?

The simple answer is you don’t put your valuable data in a Public cloud.

Then what do you get?  A Hybrid cloud solution.  You keep some data in the public cloud and some in a private cloud.  The information and services that are truly private you keep in a private cloud.  You do not allow remote access from the Internet.  Public services go on the Internet in a public cloud and it can be used to serve your customers.  There is not one solution that is best for everything.   Managing a hybrid solution will give you the best of both worlds.

Going with a hybrid solution also works for personal and family data too.  There are many public clouds offered like Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive where you can put your public data.  These are the files you will not worry too much about if they were to be hacked.  For private data (financial and medical records), you keep on a small NAS drive on your home network.  Most importantly, do not allow access to that data from the outside.  This approach also works well for small business too and it is the solution I currently use.  I talk a lot about this in my article Which Cloud Storage is Right for You.

Data is divided into 3 categories; Private; Public; and outdated.  

Outdated information is archived on removable media and stored offline hopefully never to be needed again (or just deleted if you can).  Public data is stored in the public cloud where I can get to it from everywhere.  This data poses little risk if it were to be lost or stolen.  Private data is stored on a local storage on a private network that is only visible to locally connected computers.

But we live in the information age and having data means having the answers that we need to run our business.  We are always on the go and most people need data to find those answers no matter where we are so we are forced to make a choice.  We can risk having our data stolen or change the way we live our lives.  This choice is not acceptable to most as we have enjoyed living our lives outside of our homes and offices and going back to the old way of life will be unacceptable to most people.

We must learn to live a more secure life or we could find our digital lives being stolen right before our eyes.

It is unacceptable to take any kind of risk with our personal data or our customer’s data.  We must learn to live with certain restrictions in our lives or pay the price later   Leave that secure data in a secure place and enjoy accessing your public data everywhere you go.  Don’t trust anyone with your private data and destroy it once it is no longer needed.  Difficult problems need sensible solutions!  If you follow this advice, you will have reduced the possibility of having your life or business turned up side down by data theft or loss.

Just to be clear, I am not against outsourcing your private cloud somewhere.  I am against connecting private data to the Internet or having it in a position where it can be stolen.  I don’t leave my car or house unlocked  and I shouldn’t do the same with my data.  This is just common sense and if we all applied more common sense when adopting new technology, I think our lives will be much better and isn’t that the point of adopting all this new technology in the first place?

Conclusion

The cloud is here to stay.  I hope I answered your question on if you should use a Public vs Private Cloud.  If you have any additional questions, please feel free to post a comment and I will do my best to answer them.  If you liked this article, please signup to receive information about when we release new articles.  This way you will always be up to date on your business technology.