Public vs Private

Here are some guidelines to help you decide on whether to take servers from our public or private cloud deployment models.

Firewalling

Whilst our public cloud servers are fully firewalled with per-server firewall rules, ISO/PCI standards may dictate that a dedicated firewall is required and so this requires the private model.

VPN

We do not allow site to site IPsec VPNs from customer networks to the public cloud firewalls; therefore if you have a requirement for a permanent site-to-site VPN then the private cloud model is required.

Both public and private cloud deployments include SSL-VPN access for remote administration.

Network Isolation

By default, public cloud servers cannot see each other behind the firewall. Some customers, particularly web development agencies or resellers, may want to create individual servers for their individual clients and server isolation would be preferred in this instance.

Conversely, if a customer wishes to create an infrastructure with a number of servers that can communicate securely and at 10Gb wire speeds (e.g. split web/database/file servers), a private cloud deployment with a dedicated VXLAN network segment is ideally suited to this purpose.

Load Balancing

If a customer wishes to have multiple webservers behind a load balancer (typically with a centralised database or fileserver) then the private cloud model is required. Load balancing is not offered on the public cloud model.

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