Private Clouds

Private cloud

Private clouds (also known as an internal cloud or corporate cloud) owned and used by single private businesses and organisation. It is a single tenant environment. The organisation using it (the tenant) does not share resources with other users. Those resources can be hosted and managed in a variety of ways. The private cloud might be based on resources and infrastructure already present in an organization’s on-premises data center or on new, separate infrastructure. It can be also provided by a third-party organization. In some cases, the single-tenant environment is enabled solely using virtualization softwares like VMware and Citrix.

You have complete control over the infrastructure, you can create your cloud computing approach to your own preferences and internal processes. Some of the more stringent security and compliance on certain types of data and resources can be kept inside your own security boundary. It is the most secure option because the organization has direct control over the infrastructure and only authorized users can access the network. This is one of the major kind of web hosting used for small business

Private clouds are often deployed when public cloud usage is not possible for the needs of a business. For example, a public cloud might not provide the level of service availability, uptime and security limitations the organisation needs. In other cases, the risk of hosting a mission-critical workload in the public cloud might exceed an organisation’s risk tolerance. There might be security or regulatory concerns related to the use of a public cloud environment. In these cases, they might opt to go in a private cloud to utilize the benefits of cloud computing, while maintaining total control and ownership of its environment.

Types of Private Clouds

• Virtual Private cloud
• Managed private cloud
• Hosted private cloud
• On-premise Private cloud

Virtual Private clouds

A virtual private cloud (VPC) is a type of cloud model that offers the benefits of a private cloud with the help of resources in public cloud. In a normal private cloud, the organisations internal IT department acts as the service provider, and the individual business units act as consumers. In a virtual private cloud model, a public cloud provider acts as the service provider, and the cloud users act as its consumers. So in simple terms a virtual private cloud is a hybrid model of cloud computing in which a private cloud solution is provided within a public cloud provider’s infrastructure. It is a kind of isolated environment in the public cloud.

Managed Private Clouds

A managed private cloud is one type of private cloud model in which the infrastructure is not shared like the AWS Private Clouds. It is also referred to as a dedicated or single-tenant cloud. This type of private cloud is managed by a third-party vendor. The vendor provides support, maintenance, upgrades, and even remote management of the private cloud. In some cases, vendors also manage the software applications in cloud. There are so many managed cloud provides like AWS, Cisco, Azure and Dell.

On-Premise Private Clouds

Unlike hosted private clouds, on-premise cloud solutions allow users to host a cloud environment internally. So for such a cloud model, it is necessary to have an internal data center to host the cloud server. This type of private cloud model is very secure as they are internally hosted and managed by an organization’s internal IT department. The organization, therefore, has complete control over the security, configurations, and scalability of its servers. There are so many on-perm private cloud likes Azure stack , VMware which is helpful.

Hosted Private clouds

Hosted private cloud offers cloud servers in their own data centres with the help of the cloud software provided by the vendor and the organisation is responsible for security management. In a hosted private cloud model, users get access to additional resources, a support team, high-demand scalability options, as well as a user-friendly dashboard to assist in server management. There are so many providers like Azure, VMware who provides hosted  services.

Two models for cloud services can be delivered in a private cloud. The first is infrastructure as a service (IaaS) that allows a company to use infrastructure resources such as compute, network, and storage as a service. The second is platform as a service (PaaS) that lets a company deliver everything from simple cloud-based applications to sophisticated-enabled enterprise applications.

Advantages

The main advantage is that resources are not shared. Because of its proprietary nature, a private cloud computing model is best for businesses with unpredictable computing needs that require direct control over their environments. It also needs to meet security, business governance or regulatory compliance requirements.

When an organisation properly architects and implements a private cloud, it can provide most of the same benefits found in public clouds. The benefits are such as user self-service and scalability. It also gives the ability to provision and configure virtual machines and change and optimise computing resources on demand.  They can also can also implement tools to track computing usage and ensure business units pay only for the resources or services they use.

Disadvantages

They have their own disadvantages. There is not much significant amount of automation and user self service can be done as like the public clouds. It needs more IT administrators and architect teams to configure and run. Expensive to the business because you need to own all the requirements. The hardware, software and power etc will be on your cost.

High Lights

• Complete control over all the components like infrastructure, Data, Security, Access.
• Owned by single entity
• Own Process.
• Increased security
• Increased Performance.
• Customisable as per requirement.
• No cost for unused components

Low Lights

• Cost of setup is high
• Maintenance cost increases over a period of time
• Need specific skill set to manage the infrastrcutre
• Utilization of resource is very less.

Once you have finalised in on which Cloud Service Models that suits your organisation and the next step will be to look into the selection of the providers. The deployment model tell you how to distribute and manage the underlying infrastructure like the servers, storage, and networks. The Service model will help you to differentiate the layers of service that is required for you. So you are ready with the second step in the journey to cloud adoption. The selection of providers for Private cloud needs to be done carefully based on the value for money and options that can be customised for our needs.

Happy Private hosting.