Why one cloud type doesn’t fit all

Nick Hayne, head of professional services at Quiss, gives a breakdown on the two types of cloud and the ways to leverage them based on your firm’s needs.

The ongoing pandemic has, for many legal businesses, highlighted the importance of IT to enable them keep working. But once the initial shock of going remote is gone, there are still ongoing questions about what the best options are.

Cloud is on everyone’s agenda and a hot topic in boardrooms everywhere, but while these discussions are as important as the financial position of the business in many cases, the issue can be daunting even for experienced professionals.

Hybrid is not a third cloud

Strictly speaking there are two cloud options: private or public. Hybrid, the often cited third cloud, is merely a combination of the first two, with the proportion of each varying to suit the unique requirements of the organisation.

Many firms have invested in new on-premise IT equipment via a traditional Capex model and are keen to extract maximum return on their considerable investment, which a hybrid cloud option enables them to do.

And many firms will have their primary solutions operating from a private environment, but they’ll use the public cloud for disaster recovery and business continuity provision – where they will generally only pay a monthly fee for the environment. These are the clouds and some of their respective benefits.

Private cloud – an extension of your local area network. It’s typically – but not always – in your building, behind a firewall that isolates your servers from the internet. Private cloud is still a favoured option for those in regulated sectors (finance, legal), where there’s a perception it provides greater direct control and security – many of these concerns have now been addressed by public cloud providers.

Public cloud – fully remote servers accessed through an internet connection. Public cloud offers instant scalability and undertakes maintenance of the necessary infrastructure, which is typically provided as a monthly subscription. Significant ongoing investment by the public cloud providers is being repaid by a significant uptake globally of their services.

Hybrid cloud – combines public and private cloud environments to deliver high levels of flexibility and is now the mainstay of cloud computing models for most organisations, whether they recognise the fact or not. The public aspect offers flexible scalability, up or down, and private offers the elements of on-premises control favoured by organisations in regulated sectors.

Remember, there are only two clouds, but, here at Quiss, we’re happy to help you get the balance of public and private right for your business as it adopts a hybrid cloud future.