Private Cloud

Delivering Applications on Private Clouds

The concept of the private cloud has gathered steam over the past couple of years. While public cloud infrastructures generally rely on locating your data in someone else’s datacenter, private clouds allow you to design much of the same scalability, high availability and robustness of the public cloud, but with complete ownership and control of the infrastructure. For organizations subject to auditing, compliance, or data location requirements, a private cloud may be the only acceptable cloud architecture. Leveraging virtualization and commodity hardware, the private cloud can provide some of the elastic benefits of public cloud computing without some of the inherent risks.

With private cloud, one of the major differentiators is automation of service management. While you can do similar things in a traditional datacenter, the private cloud is an automated datacenter deployment. The private cloud gives you and your datacenter a second chance to provide the level of service you always wanted to with your current datacenter, but never had the time, resources, or capabilities to build.

The benefits of an enterprise adopting a specific private cloud model versus its current IT infrastructure can be difficult to prove. Justifying the creation of a private cloud in the data center must be analyzed against the potential for gain in overall efficiency and cost. The goal of enterprise IT is to run applications, not just build expensive IT infrastructure like data centers.

Moving to a private cloud may be necessary where data center resource utilization is low. What enterprises often find is that disorderly planning in server consolidation throughout virtualization creates inefficient resource pools that can see improvement through the use of private cloud tools. Private cloud technology planning needs to ensure the current data center structure that's delivering applications as a service is doing so with high efficiency.

Despite the numerous benefits of cloud computing, there is a huge gap between the cloud infrastructure and the enterprise requirements associated with running an application securely, robustly and effectively. There is a layer of services associated with the care and feeding of the cloud infrastructure including monitoring, backup and D/R, auto-scaling, security management and billing. There is another layer of service associated with the application itself including customer provisioning, helpdesk, application upgrades, application management and reporting. Finally there is a layer of support services that includes things like cloud migration, business services consulting and account management. These activities are application and implementation specific and require a deep knowledge of both the underlying cloud platform and the application architecture and usage.