There are three types of clouds, right?

First and foremost, there's the public cloud – platforms like Google Drive, Dropbox and AWS that give users storage space for a fee.

Then there's the private cloud. If you're a bank, a hospital or a national security agency, you're probably not going to want your sensitive data to be stored on the public cloud. You're going to have your own data centre that you watch like a hawk and guard like a hellhound.

And then there's the hybrid cloud. This is like a creature from Greek myth – half-public, half-private. The classified stuff goes on the private cloud and the rest of your workloads reside in the public cloud.

It's worth pointing out that "public clouds" are, of course, private in the sense that they're highly secure. It's not quite the semantic minefield that makes a British public school privately owned, but it's not a million miles away.

So that's your lot, yes? Well, no. Different situations call for different cloud models – and some niche varieties have sprung up.

Let's take a look at some of these lesser-known clouds.

Community cloud

POV: you're part of an organisation alongside a range of other companies and partners. You all share a common purpose – why can't you share cloud space too?

This is sometimes the case in the education sector. Governors, PTAs and schools could all benefit from access to the same data, software and apps.

So a community cloud is one where cloud resources are pooled together but kept private. It's a members-only club where everyone shares a common purpose.

One reason you might not have heard of a community cloud is that they don't unlock cost savings in quite the same way as public clouds.

Google Workspace has six million business subscribers but a community cloud might have a dozen. That means the subscription model is a little less eye-catching. On the other hand, it's far more economical than each member paying for their own private cloud.

Distributed clouds

A distributed cloud is where different machines in different locations are all hooked up to a single network.

Sounds like a normal cloud, doesn't it? The difference is that distributed cloud computing does away with terms like public, private and hybrid. Servers, storage and databases aren't provided by individual cloud platforms – but they're experienced as such by the user.

A distributed cloud looks like a single cloud platform but it's actually cobbled together from separate clouds. It could be some combination of a public cloud, on-prem data centre, private cloud and third-party colocation partner.

Distributed cloud computing is on the rise, with technological research firm Gartner predicting that by 2024, "most cloud service platforms will provide at least some distributed cloud services that execute at the point of need".

And even if you're not up to speed with the lingo, you've probably enjoyed the fruits of distributed cloud computing in the form of Netflix or YouTube.

Multi-cloud

You might not know it, but we're living in the age of the multi-cloud. It's increasingly unusual for enterprises to rely on a single cloud provider. More often than not, they pick and mix.

A recent survey shows that 85% of organisations use two or more IaaS providers. Surely this is more trouble than it's worth?

Well, it's a bit like making an omelette. You might find that Lidl has the best offer on eggs but there's a deal on butter in your local corner shop. In the same way, it can be prudent for enterprises to mix and match cloud resources to get the best possible deal.

The big players are responding to our multi-cloud needs by working together. In the cloud world, Oracle Database partnering with Microsoft and AWS is like Batman meeting Robin.

How, you might be wondering, is this different from hybrid clouds? Well, a multi-cloud uses multiple vendors. A hybrid cloud, on the other hand, uses a mixture of private and public deployments.

Poly cloud

Next, there are poly clouds – which you could be forgiven for thinking were the same as multi-clouds. After all, "multi" is Latin for "many" and "poly" is Greek for, um, "many". So what's the difference?

Multi-cloud solutions involve running the same workloads on different cloud platforms. Poly cloud computing is where you break up your workloads into chunks and run them on different platforms.

Each chunk is allocated to the provider that suits it best. You might, for instance, run data storage on AWS and your AI services on Google.

Both muti-cloud and poly-cloud solutions allow enterprises to pick and choose from different vendors – but these services are used in different ways. They're both examples of what's known as "cloud agnosticism" – the use of different vendors to build a system.

HPC cloud

Finally, there are high-performance computing (HPC) clouds. HPC is where thousands of processors work together as one supercomputer.

These clusters of computers can be used for all sorts of reasons – from climate modelling to detecting credit card fraud.

Trying to run a supercomputer on a public cloud would be like trying to power a shopping centre with a watch battery. HPC clouds are built for the big league.

The bottom line

All of these types of cloud are available to enterprises – although you need to be crunching some serious data to justify a supercomputer.

Many cloud consultancy firms are also cloud agnostic. Like aeroplane pilots, they don't mind where you're heading – their job is just to get you there as painlessly as possible.

At Ascend Cloud Solutions, we pride ourselves on managing migrations with a minimum of disruption to your business – whether you're moving your workloads from an on-prem data centre to the cloud, or from one cloud provider to another.

If you're looking for expert VMware cloud consulting services, we'd love to hear from you. Get in touch today for a free, no-obligation consultation.