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Clouds can be public or private, though public clouds are more commonly associated with cloud computing. Public cloud platforms, such as AWS and Microsoft Azure, pool resources in data centers often distributed around the globe, and users access them via the internet. Resources are provided to customers through metered services, and the cloud vendor is responsible for varying degrees of back-end maintenance.

Private clouds are walled-off environments hosted in a corporate data center or a colocation facility. They lack the massive scale of public clouds. But they do have some elasticity, and a company’s developers and administrators can still use self-service portals to access resources. In theory, private clouds provide greater control and security, though it’s up to a company’s IT team to ensure that happens.

Virtually any workload can move to the cloud, but not all of them should. Large, monolithic applications that run constantly, with relatively consistent and predictable loads, are often more cost-effective on premises. Also, highly regulated enterprises tend to keep applications and sensitive data in their private data centers due to governance and data security concerns.

An organization can move an application as-is to the cloud, but that’s typically not the best option. Use a cloud migration to reevaluate your IT architecture and identify greater efficiencies. An application can be broken into microservices to take advantage of the service-based approach of IaaS. Alternatively, a move to PaaS or SaaS can offload undifferentiated heavy lifting.