Increasingly, users of technology understand the benefit of turning to the cloud –whether it be for cloud computing, cloud storage or cloud communications. But it sometimes is not as clear when it comes to the benefits of public clouds versus private clouds.

NaviSite (News - Alert), a leader in cloud computing services, recently submitted a blog post for “InfoSecurity Magazine,” in which Allen Allison, chief security officer at NaviSite, contends that a cloud, whether it’s public or private, offers many benefits, such as having a lower total cost of ownership.

Allison explains that the debate about pubic versus private clouds “is not just about which solution is best” but that it “extends to the very definition of cloud.”

He defines the public cloud as, “a multi-tenant computing environment that can deliver on-demand resources in a scalable, elastic manner that is both measured and metered, and often charged, on a per-usage basis.”

Public clouds are often accessible, through the Internet, from anywhere.

On the other hand, the cloud computing expert defines the private cloud as a “single tenant computing environment that may provide similar scalability and over-subscription to the Public Cloud, but solely within the single tenant’s infrastructure.”

“The infrastructure may be on the tenant’s premises, and may be delivered in a dedicated model through a managed services offering,” Allison said.

Private clouds are often accessible from the tenant’s infrastructure, he added.

But sometimes external access may be made via the Internet or other connectivity system.

When it comes to private clouds, the owner or tenant has relative flexibility on “policies and procedures for provisioning, usage, and security,” Allison said.

But in the public cloud, a tenant will find it has “less control over the shared resources, the security of the platform, or the compliance of the infrastructure,” Allison adds.

In addition, in the public cloud tenants will get more scalability and capacity because “adding resources or managing the environment is not tied to a single tenant, but spread over all tenants of the platform,” Allison said.

In a private cloud, a tenant has greater “control over maintenance schedules, upgrades, and the change-management process. This allows for greater flexibility in the managed platform to comply with specific requirements,” Allison said.

With public clouds, costs of “shared security infrastructure that may be available to customers can be spread over multiple tenants,” Allison said.

And cloud providers are able to deliver managed cloud services on a public cloud platform with the environment on a “robust, highly scalable platform with the ability to grow much larger than any individual private cloud environment.”

In other recent news about NaviSite, Everything Channel’s CRN Magazine named NaviSite as one of the 100 Top Cloud Computing Vendors, TMCnet reports.

The list of the top 100 vendors, published in CRN, names cloud vendors and solutions that are particularly innovative, TMCnet added.