What is a Community Cloud?

 Cloud computing’s benefits have ensured that it is rapidly becoming an important part of most businesses’ functioning. It is of four types: private, public, hybrid and community cloud. The focus of this blog is on the concept of community cloud.

A Community Cloud

A community cloud is essentially a private cloud’s hybrid form. Community clouds are multi-tenant platforms and make it possible for various companies to function on a shared platform. This ensures that many clients can work on joint projects as well as applications, which require a centralized cloud infrastructure. A community cloud refers to an infrastructure that is distributed and which is meant to solve certain specific issues of businesses. This is attained through the integration of services that are delivered by various types of cloud solutions. Community clouds aid their users in identifying as well as analysing their business demands. A data center can host a community cloud or it can be owned by one of the tenants or by a third- party provider of cloud services.  It can be either on-site or off-site and is owned, managed as well as operated by one or more businesses or by a third party or by both together.

A community cloud deployment model is shared among multiple businesses/tenants that operate within a certain domain, which is common to all of these entities. Hence, access to a community cloud is restricted to these entities. In a community cloud a group of businesses share a multi-tenant setup. This is used by businesses for joint ventures as this cloud infrastructure enables access to systems and services by a group of several businesses for the purpose of sharing information. In it the costs are spread over a lesser number of users as compared to that in a public cloud. Hence, it doesn’t deliver fully the cost saving potential of cloud computing.

A community cloud isn’t different technically from a private or a public cloud. This multi-tenant data center enhances companies’ efficiency and performance. It also maintains standard protocols with regard to security, privacy, implementation, management and usage of the centralized cloud. An example of the usage of a community cloud is for testing high-end security products. It can also be used to test certain features of a public cloud environment.

In a nutshell, a community cloud refers to a form of collaborative effort which involves sharing of infrastructure among many businesses that belong to a certain community and have common concerns, such as security, compliance etc.

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Major Sectors that Utilize Community Clouds

The main sectors that utilize community clouds are the healthcare industry, media industry, public sector, scientific research, energy and other core industries etc.

In the healthcare industry, community clouds deliver a global platform on which information as well as knowledge can be shared without the risk of sensitive data that is maintained in the private infrastructure getting revealed. Companies that are in the media industry require simple and low-cost solutions for enhancing media contents’ production’s efficiency. Community clouds deliver a shared environment for business collaborations in the media industry and boost aggregate bandwidth, CPU as well as storage that is required for carrying out media-related work efficiently. Public sector’s legal and political restrictions limit the usage of public clouds. A distributed environment is provided by a community cloud for creating a communication platform for the performance of the operations in the public sector. Scientific computing is the shared interest for the adoption of community clouds in scientific research. In the sector that has to do with energy and other core industries, community clouds bundle solutions that collectively address the management, orchestration as well as deployment of operations and services.

Community Cloud’s Advantages

There are many advantages of a community cloud. These are as follows-

• It offers better cost-effectiveness than other cloud models
• It provides scalability along with flexibility
• A community’s requirements are met by the protocols and the configuration in community systems
• Ensures enhanced availability and reliability with regard to a community
• Community clouds ensure openness as these are open systems
• Community clouds do away with the dependency on cloud service providers

Community Cloud’s Disadvantages

The main disadvantages of a community cloud are mentioned below, in no particular order.

• It has lower bandwidth capacity along with limited storage
• It is challenging to maintain its security standards without skilled IT staff
• Setup costs are increased by it
• There are always consistent maintenance costs
• It doesn’t deliver the full benefits of either a public cloud or a private cloud

Conclusion:

Requirements that are specific to certain industries are addressed by community clouds while ensuring the cost-effectiveness that is provided by a public cloud. Community cloud computing provides a cost-effective solution with lesser complexities with regard to the cloud environment and ensures applications’ security.

Source:https://www.htshosting.org/knowledge-base/cloud-hosting/74/what-is-a-community-cloud