There was a period when servers were simply referred to as servers. That was before marketing departments of tech companies changed the servers they use as "the public cloud," and well before IT came back with a new name for the servers they manage as "the private cloud." In the past, the majority of the company's data was to be kept on premises in servers that were managed by corporate IT experts. Since a larger portion of this data shifts to the cloud, it poses the question: when is it more beneficial to manage your cloud in your own way? To answer that question we must first consider the definition of what a private cloud is.
The Private Cloud Defined
While early usages in the field of Hosted OpenStack Cloud are often due from the Google's Eric Schmidt, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2011 classified a private cloud in the form of "cloud infrastructure designed to be exclusive for use by a single company that includes multiple users (e.g. the business unit)." The definition is, in terms of privacy private clouds don't need to be in the company's premises or controlled by the company in order for it to count as private in the event that it is only used by employees of the company. In a cloud that is public the data you store is protected and secure, however it's stored in a shared space with other customers. If you are using a cloud that is private your data is stored on hardware owned and managed by a cloud provider however the cloud infrastructure is exclusive to your business.
And who better to judge the needs of a company than the organization itself? Utilizing the private cloud, businesses can tailor their servers, increase efficiency, and even cut costs- in theory. Private clouds in the beginning failed to meet these objectives and the more established cloud offerings have pushed data out while cloud providers that were public offered a more focused service, increased scalability, elasticity, and a constant commitment to upgrades to their hardware.
When is Private Better?
Private clouds are typically used in highly controlled fields where sensitive data is required and security requirements are stringent. U.S. government agencies, research institutions, and a variety of financial institutions operate private clouds to ensure the privacy of data requirements. This is especially the case for those companies that face HIPAA conformity problems.
Costs are another aspect. The cost of ownership for private clouds could be beneficial when compared to the public cloud, especially when incorporating additional charges like usage of network bandwidth. 451 Research, a research company 451 Research reported in the research survey conducted for 2017 that over 40 percent people saved cash by choosing an alternative to an open one. They cited the automation of tools for capacity planning, and flexible licensing agreements as the primary factors that led to these cost savings.
"Private cloud enables a huge amount of people to use resources with any issues with performance; therefore it can contribute to savings in costs because users are better at their tasks. This benefit is the most important because it's an ongoing saving," one IT director mentioned during the research.
However, cost was not the primary factor in deciding for these companies. Asset ownership and protection of data as well as integration into business operations were among the top-ranked decision points for companies who chose to use private cloud.
What are the Challenges of Running a Private Cloud?
A private cloud can be much like having the house. You clean the gutters and you trim the lawn, and you repair an unbent pipe in the frigid winter. You pay taxes, pay the bank, purchase replacement AC filters, you fix damaged windows, the list goes on. If you lease the apartment you have to pay rent and other problems are taken care of by other than you.
This peace of mind is the reason why many businesses have gone with the cloud model that's public regardless of how fast their data usage rises they'll never exceed the limit of their cloud provider's capacity. Compare that to private clouds which requires more hardware and are carefully scheduled to meet the growing demands of data. This is a typical CapEx against OpEx issue. Private clouds require large capital expenses in order to start up. These costs are eliminated in the public cloud aspect of the equation, as expenses for operating are incurred on a regular basis.
Private clouds also place greater demands on the IT department of an organization since their abilities are required to make smooth and seamless changes between different hardware, ensure uptimes and correctly set up security protocols.
A Hybrid Solution
Hybrid clouds aim to address some of these issues by leveraging the advantages in a private cloud as well as public cloud in the same. In the hybrid cloud model massive amounts of data are transferred to the cloud public, which is where economies of scale and the unlimited storage capacity offer the most suitable place for that data. Information that is critical to mission, or data that has to meet certain privacy requirements , can be kept in private clouds, which are protected by additional security.
