Private cloud

What is private cloud?

Private cloud is a computing model that features a proprietary environment for just one business entity. Similar to other cloud computing models, the private cloud model offers extended, virtualized computing resources through physical components that are stored on-premise or at a provider’s datacenter.

The private cloud model offers your business a far greater degree of control than you could get in a public cloud environment. This is because only your business can access the private cloud, nobody else can. This means that you can customize and configure the environment to your company’s particular computing needs.

Your private cloud strategy could be made up of hardware hosted locally at a facility that your organization owns, or it could even by hosted by your cloud service provider. A virtual private cloud is general paid for on a rolling basis, but by provisioning hardware and storage configurations, the benefits of a secure, exclusive network are maintained.

You can have two models for cloud services delivered in a private cloud. These include infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which makes it possible for your company to make use of infrastructure resources such as compute, network, and storage as a service, and platform as a service (PaaS), which enabled your business to deliver everything from simple cloud-based applications to sophisticated-enabled enterprise applications.

You can also have a cross between a private cloud and a public cloud, which gives you a hybrid cloud. This makes cloud bursting possible, which helps you free up more space and scale computing services to the public cloud when computing demand peaks.

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What is private cloud used for?

Private cloud computing is used to allow your organization to enjoy the benefits that public cloud computing offers (like scalability, elasticity, and self-service), while also getting greater levels of control and customization that they would normally get from dedicated resources with on-premise computing.

Organizations also use private cloud so that they can have higher level of security and privacy because of the organization’s firewalls and internal hosting, making sure that third party providers do not have access to operations and sensitive information.

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What are the different types of private clouds?

The three types of private clouds are: virtual private cloud, hosted private cloud, internal private cloud, and managed private cloud.

Virtual private cloud

A virtual private cloud is not a pure form of private cloud. It is a cloud model which gives your company the  benefits of a private cloud with the help of public cloud resources. Here, the public cloud service provider essentially plays the role of the custodian of the infrastructure and offers you more control in an isolated environment.

Managed private cloud

In the managed private cloud model, a single instance of the software runs on a server that is managed by a third-party (usually the vendor) and serves only one client. Providing the hardware for the server as well as maintenance of the server are both the responsibility of the third-party provider.

Hosted private cloud

A hosted private cloud is on-premise. The cloud servers are not located on the premises of the organization that uses them. A third-party hosts and manages these cloud servers remotely.

Internal private cloud

An internal private cloud is hosted on the organization’s premises and is managed and operated internally by the organization that uses it. The organization purchases the servers, maintains them, and administers the software that runs on their servers.

An internal private cloud is different from an on-premise data center in the sense that it runs virtual machines to optimize the use of the hardware, making it far more efficient, scalable, and powerful. They can also be scaled up easily without need for any additional configuration by your IT team. Your users can access the cloud without assistance from your IT team, and all your teams in the organization can easily get access to the cloud resources that they require.

In the internal private cloud model, your IT team can also measure how much storage and bandwidth is used and how many user accounts are active, which helps them make decisions on how to allocate cloud resources.

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What are the advantages of private cloud?

Here are the most significant advantages of private cloud:

Better resource utilization

Most servers are not used as much as they could be, private cloud uses virtual machines to overcome this issue. The virtualization technology helps improve resource utilization in a private cloud model, by allowing workloads to be deployed to a different physical servers as demands change from services.

It is also possible to adjust the resources dedicated to any specific server to manage the changing demands of any particular application.

Lower costs

A private cloud environment tends to cost less than a traditional on-premise environment. But because of virtualization and the maximized resource utilization got from it, a private cloud environment could effectively cost less than a public cloud environment for some organizations.

Studies have shown that 41% of IT decision makers have realized that their private cloud is less expensive than a comparable public cloud environment.

More security

Private cloud computing has certain security advantages over public cloud computing. Private cloud runs on physical machines, making it easier to ensure its physical security. Since the private cloud is accessed through private and secure network links, instead of the public Internet, cloud access is also more secure with a private cloud environment.

Regulatory Compliance

Private cloud environments can help with compliance issues. Your private cloud provider could also help you addres major compliance elements like PCI Compliant Hosting and HIPAA Compliant Hosting.

Flexibility and customization

A private cloud environment gives you more flexibility than a public cloud environment. It also gives you more control over the environment, being fully configurable by your organization. It is also easier for organziations to migrate from legacy on-premise systems to private cloud environments than to public cloud environments.

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What are the disadvantages of private cloud?

The main challenges of private cloud are:

Capacity utilization

The organization is solely responsible for maximizing capacity utilization. An under-utilized cloud deployment can be very expensive for your business.

Up-front costs

A private cloud hosted on-site can involve very high costs that you need to incur before you gain any value from the environment. However, with a hosted private cloud, these costs can be largely reduced.

Scalability

If you need more computing power from your private cloud, it may cost you quite a bit of time and money to scale it up. This will usually take longer than simply requesting additional resources from a public cloud provider or scaling a virtual machine.