Community cloud services are services that are shared by multiple members of a community. They centralize the functions and can provide specific mission requirements. The mission requirements can be related to specific policies and compliance. Community clouds leverage the benefits of a public cloud but can satisfy specific requirements. These are perfect for communities with specific focus areas such as performance, auditing or policies that need to be applied across the community.
A major benefit of community clouds is that many organizations can come together and pitch in for the cost of the cloud. This sharing results in significant savings compared to each organization setting up and supporting their own services. Community cloud is a term that is discussed a lot, but I have a new term for the cloud that combines multiple communities together, “Multi community cloud”. Multi Community cloud services span across communities with similar functions and interests. For example, payment cloud services can be used by multiple communities (such as banking, finance, insurance etc) to make payments to individuals and companies, this would fall under multi community cloud services. These services have to be broad enough to encompass the functions of the multiple communities. With the rapid growth of the community cloud, multi community clouds will evolve to a higher level as communities identify and realize the benefits of leveraging many similar capabilities, even though some policies may be different.