...
Tuesday, 27 September 2016 ehdf

Why Private Cloud Is Best Of Computing Worlds

When integrity and security of data is the primary consideration, private cloud delivers the best of cloud and onsite benefits.

When an organization 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 organizations 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.

Private cloud allows an end user organization to get the scale-out benefits of public cloud computing but governed and monitored by their own IT organization, including the desired levels of security, control, access, governance and policies around data. No longer does IT need to be siloed across department functions and business workflows, which happens through traditional IT.

Private cloud computing allows IT administrators to deploy an internal pay-as-you-go approach for organizational end users thereby quantitatively billing end users on their actual usage and sophistication of usage. On the flip side end users can expect much faster availability of IT resources on demand, either scaled up or scaled down, from their internal IT department.

By allowing business end users to move to an internal on-demand IT resources model, IT expenditures, which may have been paid externally through shadow IT to cloud application providers, now remain within the IT organization.

In a private cloud architecture, the hosting servers can be completely located within the network boundaries of the end user IT organization and managed by the internal IT staff. They can also be partly located inside an external data center and accessed by private, secure, high speed network connections. In either case having IT resources on virtualized servers in a private cloud allow workloads to be rebalanced and distributed without regard to internal departmental and business boundaries and purely on the basis of demand workloads. Moreover, having some of the organizational servers located offsite in datacenters is a first step towards building business continuity and disaster recovery type of support for the organization.

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 summarized 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 organization 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 summarized 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.

Leave a Comment

Thank You

Your comment will be published after approval.