As
mentioned in the previously posted article, the public cloud service
has become popular among considerably many banks and companies and
unavoidably influential enough to worry the Bank of England and the
other regulatory bodies of the UK and the EU. Whereas they admit the
accessibility and convenience of these public cloud services, these
European authorities are worried about sharing their core information of
their national economies with these foreign 3rd parties.
Even
with their non-disclosure agreement (NDA), the property right of these
information data has been no longer exclusive since it is agreed to
execute and store them in devices owned by a 3rd party, and these 3rd
party service providers are only a handful of the foreign private
enterprises nowadays. The European central banks, governments, and
other regulatory bodies are thus anxious about the phenomenon that
private banks and companies in their nations rely on these foreign
public cloud services all the more nowadays.
Well, whenever a
brand new technology emerges, these tends to always be a certain degree
of an anxiety reaction to it. The public cloud service can be compared
to the utility companies supplying electric power from their power plant
having emerged since the early 1900s. (Ref. Investopedia, 1st May,
2020) Before these utility companies were established, each individual
firm needed to prepare for, maintain, and update their own on-premise
power generator while the majority switched to relying the electric
power supply from a specialised utility company due to its accessibility
and convenience owing to its big scale merit.
※ The following
shows the architectural icons and the configuration examples by
referring to the imaginary world public cloud architectural design
instead of the real world one in order to avoid both the copyright
violation and the favouritism to a particular private corporation.
As a matter of fact, it is really advantageous for economic agents to increase their share of using the public cloud for their computer based operations and data storage. The public cloud providers bear responsibility for the durability of their infrastructure (servers, storages, and networks) often together with their platform (O/S, middleware, and Runtime) as well as updating their cyber security of them (The platform security depends on the service types, and the users are responsible for the security of applications and data unless using the software as a service (SaaS)). By outsourcing the cyber security update and the maintenance of the infrastructure, possibly with the platform, economic agents can spare more of their time and effort for their daily operations and various projects.
In addition to the aforementioned advantage in time saving by outsourcing maintenance and security updates, the scale merit of the public cloud is a remarkable advantage. This scale merit is the most critical key to optimise the net benefit of using the public cloud. Because of using the physical infrastructure, possibly together with the platform, already prepared in the outsourced data centre, the configuration and its redundancy process are agile and flexible.
The most symbolic function of the public cloud is the scalability of instances launched on servers. ]The on-premise server which is statistically set up to serve for a specific purpose e.g. data base server, mail server, web server, etc. Then, the users have to pay the fixed cost for equipping and maintaining these physically present devices.
In terms of the capacity control, it does not require users to estimate the capacity to use in advance because the public cloud service automatically scales it to match the supplies capacity with the demanded capacity every scheduled period. In terms of the on-premise environment, it is extremely costly and environmentally unfeasible to increase and decrease server machines and replaces their inside instances every short period (hourly and daily). By contrast, the cloud computing offers such an elasticity enabling flexibility to dynamically increase and decrease the number of instances.
On the other hand, the public cloud launches an instance of various types on a server and dynamically increase and decreases the number of servers while also switching the instance types depending on the user's demand at each period. The scalability of the server-instances enables the users to convert their fixed cost of preparing their server usage to the variable cost. In another word, by switching from their on-premise server to this scalable instance (the virtual server in the cloud is often called "instance" in short) they can switch their payment to a pay-per-usage model which avoids paying for unused computer capacities thanks to these scalable server instances in agile and flexible configuration.
In terms of the capacity control, it does not require users to estimate the capacity to use in advance because the public cloud service automatically scales it to match the supplies capacity with the demanded capacity every scheduled period. In terms of the on-premise environment, it is extremely costly and environmentally unfeasible to increase and decrease server machines and replaces their inside instances every short period (hourly and daily). By contrast, the cloud computing offers such an elasticity enabling flexibility to dynamically increase and decrease the number of instances.
