Private Cloud: Benefits and Use Cases

Private clouds are cloud environments solely dedicated to the end user, usually within the user’s firewall. Although private clouds traditionally ran on-premise, organizations are now building private clouds on rented, vendor-owned data centers located off-premise.

All clouds become private clouds when the underlying IT infrastructure is dedicated to a single customer with completely isolated access.

Private clouds rely on a handful of various technologies, but understanding how virtualization works is the key to understanding how private clouds work.

A private cloud uses virtualization technology to combine resources sourced from physical hardware into shared pools. This way, the cloud doesn’t have to create environments by virtualizing resources one at a time from a bunch of different physical systems.

A scripted IT process can just grab all those resources from a single source—like a data supermarket.

Making Sense of the Space Adding a layer of management software gives administrative control over the infrastructure, platforms, applications, and data that will be used in the cloud by helping cloud admins track and optimize use, oversee integration points, and retain or recover data. When the final automation layer is added to replace or reduce human interaction with repeatable instructions and processes, the self-service component of the cloud is complete and that bundle of technologies is now a private cloud.

Cloud infrastructure refers to the components needed for cloud computing. The basic elements of cloud infrastructure are the same whether you have a private cloud, public cloud, or a combination. All clouds require operating systems—like Linux—but the infrastructure can include a variety of bare-metal, virtualization, or container software that abstract, pool, and share scalable resources across a network.

You can build a private cloud on your own using resources dedicated solely to you, or use prepackaged cloud infrastructure like OpenStack from Red Hat, Pivotal Cloud Foundry or Amazon Web Services.

With private clouds, you’re completely responsible for all costs at all times. You staff, manage, and maintain all underlying infrastructure. But private clouds can also be delivered by cloud providers as part of a managed private cloud approach.