Questions we’re often asked about Public, Private and Hybrid Clouds

Organizations today are faced with many choices when it comes to their cloud strategy, and many are considering a future based on Hybrid Cloud. According to a recent study, 81% of IT leaders are adopting Hybrid Cloud–but how do you select the right cloud platforms for you? In this blog, I’ll go through some of the questions I get asked about the various cloud platforms to give you a starting point to navigate the often overwhelming decision of which is best for your business.

1. How do you define the difference between Public and Private Cloud?

Here I always refer to the NIST definitions. They’ve been around for a while and they’re a good reference structure for us:

• Public Cloud: The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for open use by the general public. It may be owned, managed, and operated by a business, academic, or government organization, or some combination of them. It exists on the premises of the cloud provider.
• Private Cloud: The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for exclusive use by a single organization comprising multiple consumers (e.g., business units). It may be owned, managed, and operated by the organization, a third party, or some combination of them, and it may exist on or off premises.
  
  

Public cloud is what most people think of when referring to the cloud. Some examples of public clouds are Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). While the Public Cloud is more commonly known, and a good option for many Oracle workloads, Private Cloud is another option to keep in mind when thinking about moving your on-premises applications to the cloud.

2. What’s important to keep in mind when comparing a Public Cloud to a Private Cloud?

Particularly with Oracle, commercial considerations are key, specifically when it comes to Oracle licensing. For most people familiar with Oracle, this will be no surprise. It’s vital to make sure you have the appropriate number of Oracle licenses when you go to the cloud because it can end up being very costly if you don’t.

Here’s a licensing model to give you an idea of what to expect from the different cloud platforms when it comes to Oracle licensing requirements:

• On-premises: 2 Intel cores = 1 CPU of Oracle license
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure: 2 Intel cores = 1 CPU of Oracle license
• AWS/Azure: 2 Intel cores = 2 CPU of Oracle license
• Private Cloud: Here it depends on the hypervisor and the platform the provider has underneath it

As you can see here, there’s an immediate advantage to OCI over the other Public Cloud options when it comes to Oracle licensing.

While Private Cloud does depend on the infrastructure of the provider, clouds like our Inoapps Private Cloud can offer the same licensing advantage as OCI and on-prem, and even more benefit in some cases.

3. Are there certain workloads that work better in Public Cloud versus Private Cloud?

DevOps and active projects are two contexts that lend themselves better to Public Cloud. If you need to spin up and down as your needs change without contractual obligations, public cloud comes into its own.

On the other hand, environments like Hyperion or Oracle E-Business Suite, which are fairly fixed in what they do and don’t tend to flex or go up and down, Private Cloud infrastructure is a good fit. Private Cloud can be provisioned for exactly what you need and tailored to your precise environment.

While most cloud vendors would ideally like customers to have everything in their cloud platform, I think the reality is that going forward, most of us will likely end up with a Hybrid Cloud solution with, for example our development and testing environments in a Public Cloud and production environments in a Private Cloud.

Things to keep in mind when moving Oracle to the cloud

A big trend that I have seen in my career is that all too often Oracle workloads get pushed off to the end of the IT roadmap. This is usually because they’re typically big systems that are heavily integrated with other business systems,  and often aren’t maintained and upgraded to the latest versions. Now we have the capabilities to move those to the cloud. But Oracle applications are complex and if you don’t have guidance through the process, it's difficult to get the kind of outcomes available from cloud hosting.

If you are considering moving your Oracle workloads to the cloud, whether that’s Public Cloud, Private Cloud, or a combination of the two, Inoapps is here to partner you through that process to make sure you’re getting all you can from the move.

If you’d like to have a chat about which cloud platform makes the most sense for your business, go ahead and reach out to us for a conversation. Or have a look at our Hybrid Cloud page to read about our expertise in helping our customers establish which Oracle solution is best for their businesses.

You can also find out more here in our recent webinar: Choosing a Cloud Platform: A Comparison of the Public, Private, and Hybrid Cloud