What is Community Cloud?

This article explains what a community cloud is. We will also discuss its benefits and challenges in detail.

Community cloud is the answer to different groups of organizations who want to share technology resources and benefits while maintaining robust control over their data and systems. Because of this feature, the use of this type of cloud is increasing among organizations.

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But the main question remains the same: what is community cloud? Don’t worry if you are unaware; you are at the right place. In this article, we will explore this type of cloud in great depth. But, before we dive deeper into the topic, let’s go over the list of topics listed under the table of contents (TOC) that we will cover in this article. Here’s the table:

Table of Contents 

• What is Community Cloud?
• Advantages
• Disadvantages

What is Community Cloud? 

Definition: A community cloud is a cloud infrastructure that allows a group of organizations in a same community to share the same computing resources, such as servers, data storage, etc., in order to save costs and improve efficiency.

Community cloud answers the need of the organizations within a group, where they want to balance the benefits of computing while also having good control over the security and privacy of the data. After pooling all the resources and infrastructure, an organization in a community can benefit from lower costs, tailored services, and improved security.

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This type of cloud is managed, maintained, and controlled by the organizations within a group or a third party. Sometimes it can be controlled, managed, and maintained by a combination of the third party plus organizations in a community/group.

In layman’s terms, community cloud is a type of cloud computing that serves specific groups of organizations in a group/community. 

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Advantages of Community Cloud 

Some of the advantages of using this type of cloud are:

• Cost-effective: One of the biggest advantages of using this type of cloud is that it is cost-effective. By sharing the resources, the cost of IT infrastructure reduces significantly for each organization in the community.
• Security: As this cloud offers services to a particular group of organization’s in a group rather than genral public, hence the access to data and systems is strictly controlled, thus providing better security.
• Customization options: As this cloud is manged and servers a particular group of organization’s in a group/community, a lot of customizations options are available which an organization within a group can use as per their requirement.
• Increase collboration: By sharing cloud infrastructure and resources, organizations can work closely, hence improving communications and collaboration between them.

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Disadvantages of Community cloud

Some of the disadvantages of using this type of cloud are:

• Limited access: One of the biggest drawback of using this cloud is that, the users or members outside the group/community cannot access the cloud, thus they are unable to take advantage of this type of cloud.
• Increased dependency: Every organization in the group is reponsible for maintaining and running the cloud infrastructure smoothly. Hence, if even one of those organizations fails to do so, it could lead to a drastic impact on the performnace and working of cloud.
• Increased complexity: Accessing and managing this cloud is dificult, as it requires clear governece rules, regulations, and processes to be set and followed by each of the organization within the group.
• Increased conflicts: Sometimes, it may happen that due to sharing of resources and decision-making power, some internal conflicts or disagreements could arise between the organization within a community.

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Conclusion

In this article, we have explored what a community cloud is. We have also explored its advantages and disadvantages in detail. If you have any queries related to the article, please feel free to send your queries to us in the form of a comment. We will be happy to help. 

Happy Learning!!