Everyone in Silicon Valley and the tech industry in general is talking about “The Cloud.” “The Cloud” is something that’s not only trendy but also very useful for business. Why deal with the burden of running your own datacenters when companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft offer third-party cloud services that will be less expensive for your enterprise in the long run?

Let a company with their own massive datacenters on every major continent handle your internet-driven backend. You don’t need the huge amount of space and overwhelming electricity costs that are required to run your own datacenter. The leading corporations in the cloud services space have all of the expensive infrastructure, constant staffing, and expertise.

There’s a lot of jargon in the cloud services space which you may be unfamiliar with if your business is shopping for cloud services for the first time. “Hybrid cloud” is one of the phrases you’ll see, and it’s no mere buzzword.

What’s a hybrid cloud?

A hybrid cloud combines a public cloud and a private cloud as one computing system.

A public cloud is the sort of thing I mentioned at the beginning of this piece. It’s what you get when you use third-party cloud services such as Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, or Google’s Cloud Platform. You’re responsible for the security of your data, and they’re responsible for securing the infrastructure that your data runs on.

A private cloud is hosted on infrastructure that’s only accessible to specific users in one organization. Sometimes a private cloud can be hosted in a datacenter on a company’s own premises. Other times, a private cloud is hosted on a third-party’s infrastructure, but your company is the only external entity that can access the particular server machines that the cloud runs on. Private clouds offer enterprises (Read more...)