How Different Types of Clouds Protect Your Data

As cloud technologies continue to grow, even small and medium-sized businesses are taking a closer look at how to best leverage these offerings to protect their critical data, meet regulatory requirements, and support modern hybrid work models. From safeguarding endpoint devices and servers to ensuring rapid recovery after a ransomware incident or hardware failure, the cloud now plays a central role in many organizations’ data protection strategies.

Three Primary Types of Cloud Networks

While the architectures of cloud infrastructure can take on a variety of complex models and combinations, it helps to start with the fundamentals. In their most basic form, three primary types of cloud networks exist, each with its own approach to data protection, security, management, and cost: private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud.

1. Private Cloud

Private cloud data storage is built on premises, typically using your own hardware and private cloud server software, and is managed by your internal resources and IT team. Data protection and storage occur locally onsite, offsite at a co-location facility with a private cloud server, or potentially even using a third-party private cloud storage solutions vendor (VPC).

In all of these scenarios, the underlying compute, storage, and networking resources are provisioned exclusively for your organization and are not shared with other tenants. This allows you to define and enforce your own access controls, security policies, data retention rules, and backup schedules in alignment with your industry requirements and internal governance standards.

However, with your private cloud, resources are delivered securely and dedicated exclusively to a single organization, locked away from the outside world and typically sitting behind your own perimeter defenses such as firewalls and VPNs.

Private cloud data storage benefits include:

• Highly secure – private cloud data storage is inaccessible by other organizations, helping to reduce exposure and limit your attack surface.
  
  
• Private cloud storage offers the ability to meet strict regulatory security requirements, such as HIPAA or GDPR, by keeping sensitive workloads under direct control.
  
  
• A private cloud server offers independence and control for fast data access, with the ability to tune performance to your specific workloads.
  
  
• Private cloud software offers the independent ability to make infrastructure changes, integrate with existing on-premises systems, and tailor backup and recovery workflows to your environment

2. Public Clouds

Public clouds provide resources (storage, applications, virtual machines, backup services) via third-party providers over the Internet. The public cloud is a multi-tenant environment where other organizations share the same hardware and infrastructure by definition, though logical and physical separation controls are used to isolate customer data.

The vendor provides security and management of this infrastructure is often delivered via various pay-as-you-go models. This enables you to quickly spin up backup repositories, virtual machines, and other services without purchasing or maintaining your own hardware, making it easier to scale capacity as your data volumes grow or your backup retention policies change.

Public cloud data protection benefits include:

• Data security, infrastructure maintenance, and physical redundancy are managed by the vendor, reducing the burden on your internal IT staff.
  
  
• Highly scalable and easy to deploy, allowing you to add storage or compute resources on demand for backup, archive, or disaster recovery use cases.
  
  
• Reduced complexity, since the cloud provider handles underlying hardware, power, cooling, and many aspects of platform management.
  
  
• Predictable, recurring costs through subscription or usage-based pricing models that can be aligned with your service offerings and budget planning.

3. Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid cloud models combine the two solutions. On-premise private cloud infrastructure is secured with the resources of third-party public cloud services, enabling you to place each workload in the environment where it performs and is protected most effectively.

Data and workloads must securely move between the two platforms as a seamlessly integrated environment, often using encrypted connections, VPNs, or dedicated links. Private cloud infrastructure is leveraged to meet the strictest security and compliance requirements for sensitive data, while the flexibility of public cloud applications and services is also enjoyed for scalable storage, off-site backup copies, disaster recovery, and burst capacity during peak demand.

Hybrid cloud data protection benefits include:

• Enhanced redundancy with multiple infrastructures, supporting off-site copies and disaster recovery strategies that improve resilience and business continuity.
  
  
• Flexibility to dedicate workloads to the best environment—keeping critical or regulated systems on-premises while leveraging the public cloud for long-term retention, testing, and less sensitive workloads.
  
  
• Highly dynamic and scalable, making it easier to adapt your backup and recovery strategy as your organization grows or regulations change.
  
  
• Reduced infrastructure costs by combining existing on-premises investments with consumption-based public cloud services, avoiding overprovisioning while still meeting recovery objectives.

While each type of cloud network has its benefits, each also has potential drawbacks in terms of cost, complexity, and ongoing management. For assistance with designing a cloud model that’s the best fit for your organization’s data protection, compliance, and recovery objectives, speak with a NovaBACKUP backup expert today.