There are three main types of cloud computing environments: public, private, and hybrid. Public clouds are attractive to organizations that don't want to own or maintain their own infrastructure or applications. You're essentially renting a virtual machine by the hour, eliminating capital expenses within the IT organization.

If you have applications or data that are confidential or very proprietary, you may not want to risk putting that information in the public cloud until you are comfortable that it is safe. A public cloud may not be able to meet the stringent regulatory compliance requirements, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) or Payment Card Industry (PCI) for your organization, and its public nature could lead to governance issues. But with the right solutions in place focusing on integrated IT Infrastructure Library® (ITIL®) processes such as configuration management, you could track and audit which services are hosted in the cloud and automate governance of these workloads.

Some enterprises are building their own internal or private cloud, in order to improve IT responsiveness to business needs and drive down costs. Private clouds are also appealing to the enterprise or company looking for a very elastic, dynamic computing or storage capacity. With a private cloud, a business service that needs additional compute or storage resources can dynamically provision for it. The benefit of a private cloud is that it enables an organization to manage the infrastructure and have more control. Doing so can put the burden of creating a secure,scalable, compliant cloud on the shoulders of IT organizations. Any gains associated with better utilization and lower capital expenditures could be wiped out or significantly reduced by the increase in administrative costs and other operating expenditures. However, by using comprehensive "cloud" service management solutions, many organizations are able to address these challenges.

Other enterprises may choose to implement a hybrid cloud, an environment consisting of multiple internal and/or external providers. The hybrid cloud offers the opportunity for providing the cost-saving benefits of public cloud services with some of the control and compliance required for private clouds. For instance, the enterprise may have a private cloud, as well as a relationship with a cloud resource provider that provides additional storage or infrastructure computing power. When peak demand is increasing, the IT organization may not own the physical infrastructure to allocate for this demand, but may instead leverage a relationship with this resource provider to pay for the needed resources for a given period of time.

Through the end of July, Guidant Partners is offering a free "Cloud Assessment" to see if your business is prepared to capitalize on the advantages of Cloud computing. If we discover that your business has elements that are cloud ready, we'll help you create the right type of cloud for your organization.  To schedule a Cloud Assessment with one of our highly trained Engineers, please send a request to info@guidantpartners.com, or call Zachary Johnson at 615-277-3361.