Cloud Computing

Public Cloud represents a majority of the current market share and is, as it sounds, cloud hosting that is openly available to the public for use. Anyone from individuals to multi-national businesses can utilize these offerings. The catch here is that multiple customers could potentially be sharing the same piece of physical hardware at the data-center level.

Private Cloud functions similarly to public however the resources are dedicated and isolated per customer. Ranging from the hardware to sometimes even the physical placement of the servers in question. This solution is generally ideal for larger and more security focused organizations.

Hybrid Cloud is an amalgamation of both public and private solutions. Some businesses may have a desire to operate their non-critical or sensitive operations to a cheaper public hosting solution, while also leveraging a private solution for say their sensitive customer information and proprietary data.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas) is when you rent the computer architecture but provide everything else like the operating system, drivers and applications etc.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) takes the rental one step further and you now only need to provide the application and data, not the operating system etc.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is when you rent the entire application stack so that you never have to worry about anything on the back-end like the updates, data or server maintenance. Examples of this being Office365, Slack, and Salesforce.