The reason to move to a cloud computing environment is primarily is that the pooling of elastic computing resources provides business agility, high efficiency, scalability, and availability, along with the added business advantage of significant cost reductions.

There are three cloud models: Public cloud, Private cloud, Managed cloud.

1. Public cloud: A public cloud model consists of a service that can be purchased by an enterprise and delivered through the Internet by a third-party service vendor. The cloud infrastructure resources like compute, storage and network are shared and consumed amongst many customers who do not buy, license or manage any hardware or software. The technology is delivered as a pay-as-you-go service. This often appeals to companies that want to get up and running quickly and prefer the idea of a subscription model and a flexible, elastic cloud computing platform.

2. Private cloud: a private cloud model is an extended version of a business’ traditional data center which is optimized to provide compute, storage and network capacity for multiple functions. A private cloud is a non-shared resource and the customer typically owns and controls the complete cloud environment for their own use. This can add considerable training and overhead to an IT organization.

3. Managed cloud: With a managed cloud services model, customers can still have their own private clouds, but a service provider takes full responsibility for building and managing the cloud infrastructure. These managed private clouds can be located either at the customer’s own data center or at the service provider’s data center. This allows organizations to offload routine management and maintenance and instead focus on their core business, thereby gaining peace of mind knowing that the managed cloud service provider is taking care of their infrastructure and securing their data 24/7.

As managed cloud services expertise and efficiencies have developed over time and cloud deployment has become more mainstream, organizations have begun to realize that it’s much more efficient for managed cloud services experts to run and maintain hardware and software for them. These efficiencies surface in the expert level understanding of the most recent releases, efficient upgrades, and expedited problem resolution.