IT personnel are under tremendous pressure to deliver solutions that would meet the expectations of your employees, customers, or partners who might demand innovative solutions for the latest devices. The CIO’s have now started to see IT as their competitive advantage rather than just another unexpected bill, although maintaining the cost is essential.

This is where computing can help you, as IT organizations have started to lean on Cloud Hosting Services to deliver the features while cutting the cost and complexity of managing it themselves. Cloud solutions are easy to scale up or down without much hassle without requiring many IT resources. Your DevOps teams can easily build and launch new applications as quickly as possible, and utilize resources for some other task.

This is one of the many reasons why companies have decided to shift towards the cloud to transform their business. With the cloud’s help, you can launch new products, enabling the delivery of the services more efficiently to improve user experience.

Despite “the cloud” being the buzz topic, let’s understand the different types of cloud platforms out there:

The public cloud is shared among multiple users of that particular cloud platform.

The private cloud is reserved for a single organization.

The hybrid cloud combines the resources of both public and private clouds, offering the best of both worlds.

The public cloud has been driving the expectations related to cloud platforms within the enterprises. Many of them opt for usability, flexibility, and cost-per-usage model. For security, compliance, and control, private clouds won’t be the right choice and instead opt for a private or hybrid approach.

This approach was supported by a study by Penn Schoen Berland (PSB) showed that three out of five mega enterprises had involved cloud computing. The report also showed that at most, 74% of them are already using private clouds while reporting that moving to the cloud had a significant impact on their business.

Among large enterprises, including financial service organizations and healthcare, there’s a common theme among them. They deployed and leverage private clouds since storing sensitive data on public clouds can raise privacy and compliance concerns.

For instance, the PCB’s report stated that only a small chunk of healthcare providers, almost 12%, store their patients’ info in the public or hybrid clouds. In contrast, fewer financial service firms (10%) have their records stored in public/hybrid clouds. Protecting the privacy of customers should be your biggest concern.

With that out in the open, private clouds are not always sufficient to address every business’s needs. While the security requirements should remain a top priority, you can also leverage the flexibility offered by public and hybrid cloud environments for less sensitive info or data.

Setting up network security devices has always been a challenging aspect of cloud environments due to the architectures being dynamic in nature. It makes security measures more expensive than ever. On the other hand, hackers are also evolving and finding new ways to attack and compromise the network continually. However, despite security concerns, cloud platforms can be strengthened with time.

Another way to increase security is through software-defined networking (SDN), enabling security for virtual machines (VMs), and other applications over the first connection point in a network. Policy controls can also allow you to customize the security requirements based on your department, container, network, application, or VM.

Often we ignore the implications of new trends, like cloud computing, on the network, good and bad. To harness the unlimited potential of cloud desktop, people must continue to evolve and address issues and risks.

The good thing is that according to PSB, almost 35% of the surveyed companies in the UK and 30% in the USA will allocate extra budget for their IT cloud service, which shows that there is still hope for cloud computing.