Which Cloud Model is Better: Private or Hybrid?
Hosting your cloud infrastructure on a private LAN, with no connections to the outside world, is easier to secure.
Devesh Mathur
HSBC India, Chief Technology Officer
The hybrid model can cater to unpredictable and dynamic needs.
Tarun Pandey
Aditya Birla Financial Services , VP-IT
In a private cloud—since you own the infrastructure and data and applications are in your network— you have more control on security. I think, that definitely needs to be kept in mind when a private cloud is being designed. The various components that comprise security like, data encryption, threat modelling, availability, and data retention, all need to be thought through. If you are hosting your own cloud infrastructure on a private LAN, with no connections to the outside world, it’s definitely a good deal easier to secure. However, you do need to have good security protocols in place.
In a hybrid cloud context, both the customer and the cloud service provider could be responsible for managing the same security risks. And that makes accountability an issue. Also, even if customers have proper security controls at their on-premise systems, they can be affected by their service provider’s inadequate security controls.
Other than security—as far as the hybrid model is concerned—there might be issues with compatibility as the APIs used by on-premise private clouds may not be supported by public cloud providers. This can lead to potential integration issues.
Although there are cost benefits associated with the hybrid model, cost cannot be the only criteria in choosing the hosting location of a service. Additionally, enterprise IT operation costs on a public cloud can be more than double the cost of just hardware and software. That’s not the case with a private cloud. You only need to manage a single pool of servers and storage based on a single internal SLA—as compared to the dual strategy in a hybrid model—which improves management and support.
Another factor in favour of the private cloud is resource efficiency. When apps are run, resources must be assigned to them, and optimal costs are achieved when all the resources in a pool can be allocated to some app. That requires a large resource pool and high efficiency in allocating the resources. Thus, cloud computing is most economical where the cloud’s resource pool is large. And the private cloud provides this large resource pool, making it more economical.
The size of the cloud resource pool and the flexibility with which resources can be allocated to applications-on-demand determines how efficient a cloud implementation is. And thus the cost savings that the cloud can offer. These are the primary factors to be considered when developing a private cloud and also in a public cloud offering because they’ll likely determine whether the provider can meet service-level agreements and sustain stable pricing.
(Editor's note: In the print issue, two of Tarun Pandey's views were misinterpreted. He believes that governance at a cloud provider’s end is probably better than enterprise security. And private clouds could find it hard to match the flexibility of hybrid clouds. The errors are regretted.)
To determine whether a public cloud (which is the worrying component in a hybrid cloud model) is suitable for your organization, you first need to analyze whether your core competency is your business operation or managing non-core apps. If you could move non-core apps to the cloud, would you still want to invest in a team to maintain that infrastructure or would you rather create a similar team for managing your core business?
A similar approach can also be taken for user acceptance testing and development. Would you want to invest in resources which you will require only for a limited period? These are some fundamental calls that businesses will have to take while considering a hybrid model. I would suggest that instead of investing in resources as and when the need arises, it is better to rent them.
Though, customer and financial data is something I would be wary of putting on the cloud as there are still a few grey areas, I feel that you should look at a rapidly scalable and provisioned infrastructure. This is why I believe that the hybrid model gives some added advantages as compared to a private cloud. If you have your datacenter in a major city like Mumbai, then real estate and power costs are very high, which translates into costly per-rack charges. Utilizing the hybrid model will help reduce manpower costs and take advantage of the pay-per-use model.
In a highly volatile economic market like ours it’s very difficult—after a point—for a private cloud to provision for a highly flexible infrastructure. The hybrid model can cater to unpredictable and dynamic needs. This ensures that you’re not paying for peak load infrastructure.
With respect to security, if an organization’s IT security policies are strong enough and are audited from time to time, then it doesn’t matter whether the data is on a public cloud or not. So, organizations shouldn’t worry too much about privacy and security.
Moreover, it only takes one incident of information leakage from cloud service provider to become public before the whole model will crumble. So it is in their interest to ensure that their governance structures are strong and that data is secure. Their policies are likely to be more stringent than ours. Moreover, 80 percent of data thefts happen within the organization and not at the datacenter. So where is the security of cloud coming into the question?
Today, people are using cloud-like applications for personal use without inhibitions of divulging personal information over e-mail and even through online financial transactions. So the reluctance to move to the cloud has more to do with an individual’s insecurity of losing control, the inability to convince business, and a lack of clarity between the users and service providers, than the actual security risks.
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Providing monetary benefits is an easier route to take but like most shortcuts, it’s not very effective.- Tarun PandeyAditya Birla Financial Services,VP-IT
