Much more ambitious than the public version of the Cloud, Private Cloud hosting enables a company to manage its substantial computing and storage needs itself, and to better secure its data. This option is motivated by a desire to focus on innovation rather than environmental management.
What is a Private Cloud?
The Private Cloud is based on the individualization of resources and services. Each customer benefits from a dedicated infrastructure. There are 2 types of Private Cloud: Internal and External.
With an Internal Private Cloud, a company invests in its own infrastructure (On Premise) and makes it available to its users and business departments on a self-service basis.
External Private Cloud means that this infrastructure is hosted outside the company by a service provider.
The objectives and issues are not the same. With an internal private cloud, the company intends to have complete control over its end-to-end infrastructure (energy resources, hardware resources, etc.). It is very often an extension of a traditional datacenter, optimized to provide the storage capacity and processing power required for various functions.
With an external Private Cloud, each customer accesses his or her environment via secure networks (VPN), and is free to exploit the advantages of the Public Cloud for occasional needs.
While public cloud adoption is set to increase, Gartner believes that private clouds will also attract many organizations, attracted by the benefits they offer.
The benefits
- Tailor-made to meet specific requirements
Although public cloud offers a wide range of services, private cloud is better suited to certain business constraints. This tailor-made environment takes into account all kinds of constraints, such as :
- Licensing systems imposed by certain vendors: Even if this is less and less the case, some vendors don't have a licensing model adapted to Public Cloud environments, or don't allow existing licenses to be reused in the Public Cloud. To avoid having to make a new investment, companies opt for the Private Cloud.
- Recovery of existing environments: Some applications are not eligible to run on the Public Cloud, but are often still indispensable. The company can therefore maintain these environments thanks to the Private Cloud.
- Total control over data security
The configuration of the hardware, storage units and network is defined in such a way as to precisely meet the specifications of the IT security managers and the compliance constraints of its sector of activity (healthcare, energy, etc.). Recommendations include the isolation of information and the underlying infrastructure. Finally, the company retains total control over its data.
- Higher performance
The tailor-made nature of the Private Cloud enables companies to choose the hardware on which their infrastructure will be based, and to seek a high level of performance to meet their business constraints.
The limits of private clouds
- Substantial investments
Although virtualization is the key to implementing a private Cloud, as it enables cost savings by using existing hardware infrastructure, the enterprise will have to invest in resources (hardware and software). To gain agility and respond to internal user requests, it will need to implement self-service and automatic provisioning solutions, which often represent heavy investments.
The company can also rationalize its costs by transforming CAPEX investments into OPEX operating expenses.
- A busy IT department
The company faces a major challenge: being able to predict how all the components will fit together. A well-thought-out evolution plan is therefore essential. In addition, the IT department will have to oversee this infrastructure: energy maintenance, air conditioning, software and operating system updates, deployment and configuration of cybersecurity solutions...
These tasks can be delegated to a service provider, allowing the IT department to concentrate on its core business and its users.
- (Potentially) non-extendable resources
Limitations in physical hardware and a lack of space could lead to a capacity ceiling. In this case, the company could rely on a hybrid cloud to gain scalability and consume pay-as-you-go resources on public cloud environments.
Primarily designed for large enterprises, a private cloud represents a key element in a digital strategy designed to accentuate know-how and innovation.
