When comparing cloud architectures, there are a few distinct benefits of public clouds when compared to private and hybrid clouds. First is the fact that as a public cloud customer, you never have to purchase any hardware or software. Your cloud service provider is responsible for all of this — and simply charges you for the services you consume. The other difference is that many public cloud offerings are managed by a service provider all the way up to the application itself. This is known as software as a service (SaaS) — and it can prove cost effective in many enterprise situations.
While many enterprise needs will require the use of a private or hybrid cloud architecture, there are some uses that truly take advantage of the benefits that only the public cloud can deliver. Today, we’re going to look at three examples where we think the public cloud is an absolute no-brainer.
1. Testing and development:
Whenever you are developing and testing out new applications, it is preferable to operate in an environment that not only is not in production, but also in an environment that can rapidly change and adapt to the immediate needs of the dev team. The public cloud can scale, morph and adapt to virtually any situation with a few clicks of a mouse. And when the development project is complete, the entire environment can be either significantly scaled back or even turned off since the public cloud uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model.
