Businesses today have analyzed and understood the relevance of cloud.

Cloud offers a comprehensive solution for organizations to leverage the benefits of scalability, agility and flexibility of resources thus ensuring an appropriate work load distribution without increasing the IT budget.

However, the debate between the adoption of private cloud or public cloud environment still persists and causes a lot of confusion in the minds of potential cloud users.

The decision to make a shift to either public or private cloud environment depends on numerous factors such as criticality of applications to be deployed in the cloud, regulatory issues to be adhered to, and consumption pattern to define the workloads etc.
It is highly imperative to differentiate between private and public cloud, so that a business can take an intelligent decision about the service to be implemented.

Public cloud refers to a cloud platform, where the client applications or infrastructure is hosted by a public cloud provider in its data center. The customer is unaware about the location of the cloud server and thus has no visibility and control over this platform. In case of public cloud, the cloud infrastructure is shared among multiple organizations; however the business data of each of the public cloud user is appropriately segregated and regularly monitored.

On the other hand, private cloud is deployed within a private platform located in the client data center. Unlike public cloud, only a single organization houses its data in the private cloud environment.

Public cloud platform is more relevant for small and mid-sized organizations that cannot afford private cloud infrastructure, have less investments to make and are not worried about data loss. These businesses reap benefits of utility billing model and huge cost savings with this cloud deployment model.

Private cloud infrastructure holds a lot of relevance for large organizations that can easily deploy independent servers and infrastructure. It provides businesses a comprehensive control over the business critical applications and data. Robust security measures such as firewalls, restricted access and data encryption are apt for large businesses and organizations that need to ensure utmost data safety. But this might prove to be an expensive and time consuming cloud model in comparison to public cloud.

Public cloud or private cloud, the choice solely depends upon the business needs and the budget of a business. So, before opting for a cloud service, make sure to consider the various options available with the cloud service provider.