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What is the difference between data center and cloud?

While both, cloud and data centers facilitate data storage and access, there is a basic difference in the way their services are offered. Cloud is an off-premise resource for data storage that is accessed over internet, while a data center is essentially a part of on-premise IT infrastructure of an organization. Reputed hosting service providers including Go4hosting.in own and operate tier III data centers facilities for providing hosting services including cloud hosting, shared hosting, dedicated hosting, and VPS hosting with 99.99 percent SLA backed uptime.

Data centers can also be built within organizational premises for greater control on IT operations. Such in-house data centers are run by large corporate organizations and involve huge investments in terms of purchasing of hardware, software, hiring of technical manpower, maintenance, and other overheads such as power and bandwidth expenses.

Cloud providers depend on data centers for positioning their servers at different locations. This provides cloud an added advantage of ensuring availability of services in the event of any event at a single data center location.

Data center suffers from several restrictions. It is not possible to burst the number of servers in a data center based on sudden rise in demand. However cloud services empower users to scale up number of resources due to dynamic scalability of cloud hosting services.

Cloud systems can be built within moments and can also be de-commissioned instantly. This cannot be applied to data centers that may require months or years to come into existence.