Why private cloud is needed to optimise your overall cloud strategy

To keep IT infrastructure up to date, operational and secure, enterprises today must manage a perfect balance of IT economics, application performance and security controls. Businesses can thrive only if they are truly agile, leverage highly automated infrastructure, and incorporate real-time data analytics when making critical-business decisions.

For these reasons we see many organisations choosing a path to drive a ’cloud first’ strategy and in particular the use of one or more public clouds, known as ‘multi-cloud’.

However, whilst public cloud may deliver these objectives there are still many reasons why an organisation should invest in their own private cloud as part of this overall strategy.

We will explore the reasons and will re-evaluate the case for why the economics may actually be better to use private cloud as part of their hybrid cloud strategy

We will actually make the case that these private clouds often provide levels of agility, automation, and efficiency as well as cost models that are comparable to those of public clouds without forcing users to give up control of data or risk outages related to lower availability of service-level agreements (SLAs).

To understand the principles of choosing a private cloud we first have to reconfirm our understanding of the key cloud technologies and terminology before exploring the deployment options.

All types of cloud are based on next-generation datacentre technologies that often support a completely virtualised and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI).  These types of solutions collapse core compute, storage, and network services onto a highly virtualized and potentially automated cluster of shared or dedicated x86 server resources.

There are a large number of options from various vendors and cloud providers to choose from.  But common is they all use cloud virtualisation/ HCI technologies and therefore the adoption of this technology will be a key principle to support a future hosting IT strategy.

In this way all types of cloud can reduce infrastructure spending, reduce complexity, and increase the agility of IT staff.

The next step is to choose the right approach for application hosting and for building the underlying physical infrastructure that supports it.

We see that:

Using these definitions, the location and type of cloud will largely be chosen on the predictability of the workload.  This will provide the reassurance that the volume of cloud resources required are the correct ones.

Using poorly suited cloud services for application requirements that end up underutilised or not used at all needs to be avoided.