The private cloud is an advantageous option for obtaining benefits like efficiency in storage, memory, and computing as well as quicker response times for applications and meeting data compliance regulations.
It sounds great, but there is quite a bit of confusion about what exactly a private cloud is, what it’s not, and whether it’s a good solution for various types of settings.
What Is a Private Cloud? A private cloud infrastructure is exclusively used by one organization and its business units. It does not need to be on-premises or even owned by the business that uses it. It may be owned and hosted by a major cloud services provider, or the business may enlist a provider that builds and manages a private cloud on-premises.
Some companies even take a do-it-yourself path and transition their existing data center to a private cloud.
How Private Cloud Differs From Public Cloud: The major distinguishing feature of private cloud is that all infrastructure and resources are separate from that of any other business. That can come in varying forms, from being partitioned by software to existing solely on its own hardware, but private cloud is available exclusively to that single customer.
In the public cloud, customers claim a portion of that cloud that is provisioned for them to use, but resources are available to every user within the cloud. Multiple businesses can be running workloads, consuming CPU resources on shared physical servers.
That doesn’t mean the data is being mingled; it is isolated and provisioned to each tenant, and no tenant can read or manipulate the data of another. But they still pull from the same overall resource pool.
What Are the Reasons to Consider Cloud? The trends in cloud computing favor public cloud; it’s cheaper and innovation tends to move quickly. But there are situations in which private cloud is the clear choice:
- Government agencies, financial institutions, and healthcare are just a few examples of industries where organizations may be highly regulated and want additional control over data than what public cloud can provide. This is not only the security around the data but also control over the solutions hosting them.
- An organization with a legacy system that is designed specifically for them, but that would not work well in a public cloud, may be a good candidate for a private cloud environment.
- Companies that depend on real-time applications that demand low-latency, keeping an on-premise private cloud may not be easily matched by a public cloud services provider.
It’s Not All-Or-Nothing: Hybrid cloud is widely seen as the most flexible type of cloud computing because it offers flexibility for companies just beginning to implement public cloud solutions but still needing to host highly-sensitive data or regulated data in a more secure cloud environment.
A hybrid environment can include not only public and private cloud but also on-premise infrastructure. But it’s critical that the company also use a unified management solution where all resources can be managed from a single dashboard.
If you’re debating how to choose the right cloud computing environment, contact us at Safari Solutions. We can help you evaluate public and private cloud options with an in-depth consideration of how each fits into your overall technology plans.
