Glossary of terms

Community cloud

A community cloud is a cloud-based information platform that allows organizations to share materials and resources that arise from common organizational and technical requirements.

Such a cloud combines the benefits and features of different types of clouds to provide a comprehensive solution that meets the specifics of a particular industry. The community cloud model is primarily controlled, operated, and administered by external providers or community members.

The solution is ideal for organizations that require the same resources and work on similar projects and activities. Since it is a type of private cloud, only a select group of people have access to it. Organizations in the finance, healthcare, education, and legal sectors can greatly benefit from using a community cloud. These industries need to comply with different standards, and cloud technologies can greatly simplify the compliance process.

A community cloud is an integrated structure that combines the features and benefits of several types of clouds to cover the needs of a specific area of activity. Community clouds are more expensive than public clouds, but they also offer greater security. All cloud participants receive a fixed amount of storage and bandwidth, which makes scaling more difficult than in the case of private and public clouds.

Public clouds are ideal for young companies, while private clouds are well suited for large enterprises. Community clouds are more difficult to implement than other types of clouds. This is due to the number of users involved. Decision-making is no longer done in isolation, so it is necessary to develop regulations from the very beginning, which should cover the following aspects: mission statement; ownership of services and resources; economic model of the shared cloud and services; resource allocation and maintenance; industry norms that are binding on each organization.

Like every other cloud, a single pane management system is crucial for ease of operations and an up-to-date overview of systems at any point in time. It is important to note that a community cloud requires more specific controls for resource allocation, security protocols, and app & data management. If not a single management platform, at least application programming interface (API) standards must be agreed upon.

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