As companies continue to steamroll ahead various cloud computing models, service vendors are continuously striving to improve their underlying systems. This will enable them to provide greater support and understand client requirements in a better way.

With the advancements in the information technology, connecting a private and public instance together to create a secured and robust cloud environment has become much easier. More and more companies are partnering with vendors offering private and public cloud computing services to create a unification of technologies via APIs, virtualization, and connectors

In this light, technology pundits have forecasted the increasing adoption of community cloud delivery model in the coming years. The major factor that is expected to significantly contribute to the rise of this market is the global regulatory & network security norm followed by the service providers worldwide.

Let’s dig deeper to understand what exactly community cloud is and how it supports organizational requirements 

Owing to the growing momentum behind the cloud technology across a wide number of industries, it is notable that all size businesses are evaluating the potential benefits of the intelligence community to continually advance their capabilities and cutback IT expenditures.

A community cloud computing model is simply a collaborative effort, wherein enterprises from a particular community having common concerns share infrastructure. The infrastructure can either be managed internally or can be outsourced to a reliable third party vendor, hosted externally or internally. Hence, the total costs are cumulatively shared by the users. The important features of the community cloud from a client’s perspective are:

- It is customized according to the shared needs of multiple companies (defined as a community), which are capable of meeting industry specific requirements like security or functionality.

- The services delivered by this cutting-edge technology are process oriented instead of completely infrastructure-based services. Nevertheless, the main benefit of using community cloud is that the companies can leverage pay-per-use pricing model to only pay for the services availed. Moreover, it capitalizes on the cloud commodity solutions at the platform and infrastructure layer to ensure high elasticity and cost effectiveness.

- It makes use of hybrid cloud model to store critical business information within the enterprise firewall, and the less critical information is stored in the public cloud. The service provider offering community cloud solutions ensures delivery of complete information.

Hence, a community cloud encompasses the best of various cloud deployment models. Companies, today, are partnering with an established service provider, who act as a system integrator and has capabilities of providing best-in-class solutions.