In one of my previous posts, I discussed the security issues encountered in public clouds. Three years after, the same security issues are still undermining Cloud computing.
Furthermore, it seems that the term “Cloud” has fought its way through to now commonly referring to technology infrastructures.
We now essentially see two types of network environments (cloud-style): Private cloud and Public clouds.
So, in a nutshell, a private cloud is what we have been used to for all that long: All infrastructure is owned and operated for the benefit of a single entity, thus allowing total control of such infrastructure.
Despite all the security threats Public clouds may pose, there are situations where it’s more cost-effective to rely on them. For instance, an application that does not collect highly sensitive information (demographics, anonymous statistics, monitoring data, etc.) may be hosted on the public cloud.

Furthermore, in locations with poor infrastructure (the West Africa Region for instance), the needs for high availability are usually dealt with through lots and lots of pain (and diesel for generators). In such situations, a risk analysis needs to be effected to weight the benefits against the risks of moving some applications towards a public cloud.

There seems to be an on-going tag match between private and public clouds. However, both complement each other, and any business that needs to stay afloat in this (still) difficult financial era with the technology overload should really begin considering how best to integrate the two for the most profit.