What’s the difference between a public and private cloud solution?

Public clouds are safer, more advanced and savvy IT investments, but what’s the difference between a public and private cloud solution?

Indeed, the public cloud typically offers these three potential benefits over a private cloud solution:

1. Cost-savings between 20%-50% (client case studies)
2. Reduction of cybersecurity instances of up to 60% (Gartner, 2018)
3. 52% reduction in employees who say IT negatively affects their day-to-day work (client case study)

(See: A Layman’s Guide: 3 signs that suggest something is not right with your IT)

Private Cloud

A private cloud is essentially a series of remotely held servers which a company will use, and its IT provider owns. Extech Cloud built its private cloud solution in 2011 and continues running them today.

Generally speaking, there is one reason why a firm may choose to remain in a private cloud system. If a firm is using an old legacy application which doesn’t fit with the public cloud model, then a firm may wish to continue using a private cloud. However, this is uncommon.

Public Cloud

The public cloud is virtually the same idea, in that they are still servers, but owned and managed by much larger corporations (such as Microsoft).

These technology firms have aggressively invested in removing any concerns and driving technological advancement in the public cloud, and now the technology of public cloud has far surpassed any private cloud solution.

Public cloud solutions are continuously advancing, which users benefit from instantly. Even the National Cyber Security Centre (part of GCHQ) are using the public cloud.

Firms which do not use public cloud solutions will not benefit from economies of scale or continuous innovation that the public cloud can offer and should consider the sustainability of this approach.

By contrast, the public cloud offers everything the private cloud does, plus more, without the downsides and with a favourable pricing model, at typically at 20% – 50% better value, based on real-time usage, rather than up-front capital costs.

However, the real power of the public cloud is its intelligence, agility and ability to power-up IT departments and supercharge their capability by using technology to meet business objectives and transform firms into smarter organisations.