Have Private Clouds Finally Found Their Place In The Enterprise?
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the US , formulated the core definitions of cloud computing back in 2011, including the definition of private cloud. “Private cloud: the cloud infrastructure is provisioned for exclusive use by a single organization comprising multiple consumers (e.g., business units),” according to The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing by Peter Mell, senior computer scientist and Timothy Grance, manager of systems and network security. “It may be owned, managed, and operated by the organization, a third party, or some combination of them, and it may exist on or off premises.”
Private clouds, therefore, might be on or off-premises – but in the early days, the goal was generally on-premises, in order to bring the benefits of public clouds to the corporate data center.
Many vendors jumped into this market, putting together various ‘cloud in a box’ offerings that purported to meet the requirements for private cloud, with limited success. The problem? Getting cloud right turned out to be harder than everyone thought, and such early private clouds didn’t offer the scalability, elasticity, and resilience that were the most important characteristics of the cloud.
Over time, however, such offerings matured. “Private cloud leverages the benefits of public cloud, including rapid deployment, scalability, ease of use and elasticity,” touts the recent Cloud white paper How to get the benefits of cloud behind your firewall: IBM Cloud Private,“but can also offer additional capabilities such as greater control, increased performance, predictable cost, tighter security and flexible management options.”
For the most part, however, while vendors fell short, the public cloud providers stepped into the private cloud game. An early offering: virtual private clouds (VPCs). “Virtual private cloud is an on-demand configurable pool of shared computing resources allocated within a public cloud environment,” explains the Global Virtual Private Cloud Market 2018 by Manufacturers, Countries, Type and Application, Forecast to 2023 by Market Research Vision (purchase required). “It provides a certain level of isolation between different organizations using the resources.”
VPCs, therefore, offered the cloud characteristics that enterprises craved, but were only ‘private’ in the sense that their network settings were logically behind the corporate firewall – although physically, VPC resources shared data centers, racks, or possibly even servers with third-party cloud resources outside the private cloud.
In addition to the various ‘cloud in a box’ vendor offerings, an open source effort also sought to fill the private cloud void: OpenStack. However, as I warned in an article back in 2015, OpenStack proved overly complex and poorly managed to address most enterprise private cloud use cases.
Today, OpenStack is on the wane. “Private cloud operating systems, such as OpenStack, are falling out of favor with enterprises,” explains David Linthicum, chief cloud strategy officer at Consulting, in his Remove Hybrid & Multi-Cloud Complexity and Take It to the Next Level: A GigaOm Market Landscape Report(purchase required). “Hybrid clouds are moving away from paired public and private clouds, to paired public and legacy systems.”
Hybrid clouds – which NIST originally defined as a mix of public and private clouds – were now dropping the private cloud portion of this equation altogether.
A EMC executive in China concurs with Linthicum’s take. “Enterprises are returning to adopt solutions provided by major software developer such as or ,” explains Felix Xu, director of Dell EMC Greater China’s cloud business. “Many of them originally hoped to avoid the control of these large solution providers by using open source software such as OpenStack, but it has turned out such open source platforms do not have resources necessary for further development of these platforms to meet their needs.
