Hosted private cloud: Key benefits and drawbacks

A recent Gartner report claims that 28% of spending in key IT segments will shift to the cloud by 2022. While that growth signals an increased desire for the flexibility of the cloud, the fact is the remainder of the IT budget, representing the bulk of organizations‘ workloads, still resides in the secure confines of the corporate data center.

Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are increasingly trying to lure those workloads into the cloud with the concept of “hosted private cloud.” To that end, within the last three years, we’ve seen those companies’ respective introductions of AWS Outposts, GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine) On-Prem, and Azure Stack.

Each promises to combine the security of the traditional corporate firewall with the agility and innovation of the vendors’ existing public cloud offerings. It’s an attractive pitch, but what does a hosted private cloud really offer your business?

Here are key benefits and drawbacks to be aware of.

The benefits of deploying cloud technology on your own infrastructure are well documented. Traditional private cloud solutions eliminate the “noisy neighbor” problems inherent to public, shared cloud platforms. This is where the workload in one container, container pod, or virtual machine ends up hogging most of a machine’s resources.

That makes private cloud sound seductive on paper, but in practice private clouds have so far proved more difficult to deploy and maintain than initially thought, said Todd Matters, chief architect and co-founder of RackWare, a cloud services provider.

Shouldering the weight of hardware and software costs and other resources has simply been too big a burden for many companies, which has caused numerous private cloud initiatives to fall short of expectations (particularly ROI goals), or to suffer from delays and setbacks.

To help customers bridge the gap between expectations and the difficult realities of deploying and maintaining private clouds, providers have started advertising services that leverage their own proven technology in single-tenant environments, Matters said.

These services have been alternately advertised as “managed private cloud” and “hosted private cloud,” though there’s really no conceptual difference between them.

With hosted private cloud solutions, companies can tailor the hardware to their requirements without having to manage every technical aspect of it. Customers also have full control over their security footprint and can safely host applications not suitable for multi-tenant public cloud, such as those governed by regulatory issues.

In short, hosted private cloud gives organizations complete oversight of the environment while relaxing the need for on-premises hardware management.