When integrity and security of data is the primary consideration, private cloud delivers the best of cloud and onsite benefits
When an organisation decides to enter the journey into the cloud, they need to build realistic assumptions on how they would operate. They need to consider how much of their applications and IT resources can they outsource from third party cloud solution providers; how much do they need to keep under their control but hosted in a third party data center; and how much do they need to keep under their control and hosted on-premise.
If the answer to the first question on how much they can completely outsource is very little, and the answer to the next two questions is a significant amount under their control, then such organisations need to consider private cloud as an option for their cloud computing needs. Typically, governments, critical infrastructure, transportation, telecom, banking, finance, ERP centric, end users would be those who prefer the private cloud computing approach.
The biggest difference between public cloud computing and private cloud computing is therefore the ease with which configurations can be modified and adapted to meet internal requirements rather than being restricted by service level agreements dictated by the one-to-many approach of the shared public cloud service.
This is particularly useful for application developers who first need to scale in terms of development coding environment, then testing and improvement, and lastly deployment. All three stages require vastly different types of technology environments and if the private cloud has been setup to deliver platform-as-a-service, then internal application development teams can gain significant benefits. Other services that a private cloud can deliver for internal users are infrastructure-as-a-service and software-as-a-service.
Private cloud computing is therefore in many ways the best of both worlds – cloud based computing and the security of on-premises based administration. According to Yankee Group’s recent survey on cloud computing, private cloud computing is preferred 2:1 over fully managed public cloud solutions.
The key benefits of a private cloud environment can be summarised as follows:
- Highest levels of security in terms of data integrity
- Break down of internal departmental silos of computing
- Reduced costs of scale-out computing
- Cloud computing policy and services managed internally
- Leverages Shadow IT across the organisation into visible demand
- Brings into focus costs of IT for business managers
- Greatly benefits internal application development capabilities
- First step towards business continuity and disaster recovery
- Virtually unlimited capacity if cloud bursting is supported by third party data center
There are also some disadvantages associated with private cloud computing environments, which can be summarised as:
- Higher initial outlay of investment in comparison with public cloud migration
- Return on investment largely depends on internal economies of scale and demand for computing
- Return on investment largely depends on removal of departmental silos of computing
- Return on investment largely depends on demand for application development environments
However, over a medium to long term, wherever a business is highly dependent on the integrity and control of its business data, private cloud computing environments will generally give the best return on investment and support for the scale out of business users and business requirements.
