Community Cloud

The community cloud is a specific type of collaboration, or resource sharing, between the private clouds of organizations or companies in a specific industry or field. The needed level of integration between these clouds allows only the participating organizations to have access. As per the official definition, a community cloud is defined as follows (see Figure 21-16):

  

Figure 21-16 Community Cloud Characteristics

“The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for exclusive use by a specific community of consumers from organizations that have shared concerns (e.g., mission, security requirements, policy, and compliance considerations). It may be owned, managed, and operated by one or more of the organizations in the community, a third party, or some combination of them, and it may exist on or off premises.”

As you can tell from the definition, maintaining and operating the integration and resources among the clouds that share these resources is a shared responsibility. It must be stressed that the resources are not available publicly.

Community clouds are created because of a specific need to share resources, but the data shared is heavily regulated and needs to stay compliant. Examples of areas where community clouds are applicable are science research, healthcare, and insurance.

Government Clouds

Various countries and their governments have certain requirements when it comes to working with their information and their agencies. In these situations, a public cloud can be an obstacle, as the public environment might not adhere to the governmental requirements. For these use cases, some of the public cloud providers, such as AWS and Azure, have created totally isolated clouds, dedicated to the needs of some governments. The government clouds operate using separate data centers that do not have any connectivity to public clouds.

Here are some examples of government clouds:

  • AWS GovCloud (U.S.): Specifically for the U.S. government, agencies, and state authorities
  • Azure Government: Specifically for the U.S. government, agencies, and state authorities
  • Azure Germany: A dedicated cloud for German data-handling regulations
  • Azure China 21Vianet: A dedicated cloud, located in China, that’s compliant with the Chinese government’s regulations and operated by 21Vianet