What type of Private Cloud should organization invest?

Private cloud computing is a form of cloud computing that is used by only one organization that is isolated from others. A private cloud is unitenant and prevents exposure of data to external world or internet and results in better performance with less security risks.

A private cloud or the enterprise cloud resides on company’s intranet (internal data center) or hosted data center where the firewall protects the data. Hence, they are classified into two categories

    
       a)    On Premise Hosted Private Cloud   

      b )    Off Premise Hosted Private Cloud

In an On Premise Hosted private cloud the organization has to take care of the all the infrastructure including maintenance, licensing costs etc. Whereas in the Off Premise Hosted Private Cloud solution all the overheads are outsourced to the managing vendor.

In either of the categories one major advantage of Private cloud is that it offers a dedicated secured storage of infrastructure that is not accessible to others. Thus, providing enhanced security and further option to implement various levels of authentication and security for the infrastructure. Further organizations can decide to choose the one or more data centers either on premise or with dedicated service providers.

On Premise Hosted Private Cloud requires initial investment of dedicated hardware infrastructure and hence is suitable for organizations that has determined its cloud priorities with existing infrastructure cost or that require less investment in cost of new infrastructure. Organizations with existing data centers can look at this option as they can utilize the existing infrastructure to move to private cloud.

Since the organization maintains the infrastructure, licensing cost, management of upgrades, installations, maintenance and administration has to be done in house. This can be expensive and not suit organizations that require additional cost in investment to setup on premise or service provider-based data center and administration costs.

One of the other advantages of On Premise Hosted Private Cloud is that it allows customization of their cloud infrastructure according to the business needs and increase scalability and flexibility. However, this is also a disadvantage for organizations where on demand need for scaling virtual computing services is a challenge.  

Private cloud also suits organizations that are investing in the growing awareness of the advantages provided by virtualization technology. It enables organizations to improve infrastructure cost, performance and improve usage of underutilized hardware.

Hence, investing in On premise hosted private cloud is a good option for organizations with considerable predictability and consistency in infrastructure cost and demands. Organizations that have existing services and that can depict data related to infrastructure usage and statistics are in a better position to handle the demands and avoid the cost issue of under-utilized infrastructure. Also, this service suits organizations for whom control and security is of top most priority.

Off Premise or external hosted private cloud can be an option if organization want to be unitenant and cannot afford to scale, maintain and administer the On Premise Private cloud.