Security Think Tank: Choose public or private cloud with a clear head

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Vladimir Jirasek.

Companies are increasingly using clouds to reach for business agility, lowering costs and putting pressure on internal IT teams to improve. The question of whether a company should use public or private cloud service cannot be answered without some definitions first. Fortunately, the Cloud Security Alliance has done a tremendous amount of good work by publishing a comprehensive guidance on cloud computing.

In the guidance, a public cloud is defined as such where multiple customers, who are not related to each other, share the service. Consequently, a private cloud is the opposite of public, but with a twist. There are two types of private clouds defined: on-premise and off-premise. As the names suggest, the former is in the customers datacentre, most likely operated by the IT team, while the latter are services provided to customers with infrastructure, platform or software, while ensuring that the service is not shared with other customers…

There is however an important aspect associated with the “not shared" property, of which businesses need to be aware. In most private cloud deployments a lower level of the technology stack is often shared with other customers. For example, if I subscribe to a private email system, the network or storage it uses might be shared with other private email instances…

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