Community clouds spreading

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

As businesses continue to wrestle with the decision between private or public clouds, many are turning to a third option that may combine the best of both worlds: the community cloud.

According to a recent Cloud Computing Journal report, community clouds, which are deployed across several like-minded organizations, are growing increasingly popular across industry verticals. Rather than sharing servers with random companies, community clouds support several organizations from specific industries with similar functions and needs.

For example, if a healthcare organization decides to deploy a cloud computing solution, it might consider moving to a community cloud. Because of the strict regulations facing healthcare providers, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, it would make more sense to move to a cloud that caters to the specific security and sharing needs of the industry.

Community clouds may be instrumental in lying many of the security concerns of cloud computing to rest. However, as the news provider noted, the success of the community cloud will depend on more industries adopting the technology.

Regardless of which environment they choose, businesses are looking to spend more on cloud services going forward. According to a recent TechTarget report, 70 percent of surveyed companies have made room in their 2011 IT budgets for cloud initiatives.