Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Cloud: Flavors of the cloud
With all of the buzz today around “the cloud,” it is important to remember that we are not discussing a monolith. Rather, there are different types of cloud deployment and applications within the cloud ecosystem. While it is true that 83% of enterprises will use the cloud by 2020, the type of cloud deployed and the ways in which organizations engage with the cloud may vary greatly.
Now that we know where the cloud came from, it's important to understand the options for cloud type and suite of solutions within the cloud. Let's unpack the four main deployment models and the three main service offerings across the cloud deployment models.
The most common flavor: public cloud
The public cloud is what people most often think about when the topic of cloud computing arises. These solutions are readily available from Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others. Amazon Web Services alone has over a million active users.
In the public cloud, all computing infrastructure is located in the data center(s) of a cloud service provider and each user has a virtualized private environment within the larger public ecosystem. The provider has physical control of the hardware and is responsible for all aspects of data security, IT management, and support.
The model generally applied by public providers of cloud services is one of shared resources, offering dramatic scalability and elasticity at a fraction of the cost to end users compared to maintaining the hardware and personnel on premise. This is the main model offered by AWS and Microsoft Azure.
Taking a baby step into cloud: private cloud
For users who are uncomfortable with handing over all control and support of their IT infrastructure or data to a third party, there is a private cloud option. For a higher cost, an enterprise can set up a dedicated and private network located either on-premise or off. Here, there is an ability to privately share virtualized resources with heightened security protocols or obligations.
The tradeoff is a relative increase of cost to stand up and maintain the environment and less elastic scalability because they are still dependent on their own hardware scale and personnel.
Somewhere in the middle: hybrid or community clouds
For users looking to gain the benefit of cost savings and scalability without fully relinquishing oversight of their data, there is the hybrid cloud option. In this model, an enterprise would have both a private and public cloud infrastructure that would interact.
An alternative approach to cloud deployment is a shared private cloud or community cloud. Here, several organizations pool resources and share data management responsibility. This mitigates some of the access and control concerns organizations may have without losing the cost and scale benefits of cloud computing.
How enterprises engage with the cloud
The other way that people differentiate the cloud is in the model of services employed. Not every enterprise uses the cloud in the same way, so understanding the various models is helpful in architecting your cloud ecosystem.
Vice President of Sales at Trek10
4yGreat to see that an overview is being covered on cloud for the eDiscovery space. With more eDiscovery tooling being built as SaaS or being re-platformed or re-architected for public cloud, it's certainly becoming a hot topic within the e-discovery space. The data being created for eDiscovery cases is way more complex and varied than when I was in the industry. The variety of data for eDiscovery practitioners has not only exploded through the different forms of communication tooling (Slack, Microsoft Teams), modern CRM's (Monday, Pipedrive), and data warehouses (Snowflake) but the constant innovation ongoing at AWS and even Azure is massive. Public Cloud, your AWS's, your Azure's, your GCP's it's not just another data center, but it's an entirely new way of doing things and the possibilities are endless, creating new types of data being processed and stored. The innovation created by these large public clouds is now being leveraged in production by Enterprises including use cases involving IoT (past the Gartner Hype Cycle Trough of Disillusionment... I don't care what Gartner says) and even Geospatial and Satellite data (like AWS Groundstationhttps://aws.amazon.com/ground-station/ Challenging, yet exciting times ahead!
I help governments, law firms and businesses use technology to create successful discovery outcomes during complex litigation.
4yGreat article CATHERINE “CAT” CASEY. I always look forward to your posts and this one strikes a great balance between overview and detail.