What is a Private Cloud?

Private Cloud is a type of Cloud Computing.This article follows on from a previous article on Public Cloud which describes the benefits of the sharing IT resources for small businesses. It is recommended to read that article first.

Sharing of resource by small businesses is nothing new, for example all the businesses sharing office buildings perhaps having individual offices but sharing kitchen, toilets, power supply and often phone systems and Internet provision. Public Cloud is very much like this, the sharing of resources as much as appropriate but having that locked office door to keep individual businesses property secure.

This analogy can also be applied to a Private Cloud environment, where the office building is dedicated to a single tenant, they have the entire building to themselves, with their own phone and Internet connection and their own receptionist or security guard on the front desk and probably their own maintenance team looking after the plumbing.

So to answer the question “what is a Private Cloud” the following definition could be used: “The application of virtualisation and network technologies to provide a flexible and reactive computing environment where the pool of compute resources are ring fenced to a single tenant”.

How Private Cloud Works

Unlike Public Cloud which is a multi-tenant environment in a commercial data centre, Private Cloud doesn’t necessarily have to be hosted, it can exist as an on-premise solution; nor does it need to be big and expensive it could comprise a single physical server running several virtual server guests.

By utilising the same virtualisation technologies employed by Public Cloud businesses can easily and rapidly deploy IT resources to deal with critical functions.  This may be bringing online some more web servers to deal with a peak in demand, increasing memory or CPU for existing business systems, or deploying development, test and live servers for a new application project.

Private Cloud is perhaps less frequently used by small businesses, the costs are generally higher than the multi tenant environment of a Public Cloud as there are fewer cost savings made by sharing infrastructure and technical expertise. Private Cloud platforms are usually managed by the organisation’s internal IT department. However, many small and medium businesses can benefit from the features a Private Cloud environment has to offer. In particular there may be situations where small businesses want the flexibility of Cloud but also need to meet compliance requirements and demonstrate to regulators and governance bodies that they have total and exclusive control over their data and systems.

Benefits of Private Cloud

To summarise the features and benefits a Private Cloud solution would typically:

• Have a ring-fenced pool of underlying resources
• Be flexible and easily scalable
• Be dedicated to a single organisation
• Be hosted internally or hosted in a commercial data centre
• Have a higher level of security and privacy
• Require management and administration by the organisation’s IT department or outsourced contractors
• Give administrators total control over compute resources
• Provide greater costs savings and energy efficiency than traditional servers
• Be more resilient and reliable than traditional servers
• Be suitable for companies with strict data regulation and governance policies
• Be suitable for companies with mission critical workload
• Be suitable for both cloud native applications and legacy desktop applications

How does Your office anywhere help companies with private clouds?

One approach adopted by Your Office Anywhere seeks to provide Private Cloud services for small businesses without the need for the businesses to have dedicated IT resources looking after it. This type of cloud computing is called Private Managed Cloud. It still has the private cloud infrastructure, dedicated pool of resources ring fenced for the businesses, typically by renting dedicated physical servers, but many of the day to day systems tasks are performed by the service provider. These will include backups, Antivirus, Windows updates, as part of the service with the option of more advanced systems admin functions to manage private cloud configuration provided on an ad-hoc charge by the hour basis. There are many advantages to this type of cloud computing when compared with services like Microsoft Azure, chiefly the cost of IT support as a Microsoft Azure setup will require specific and expensive skills to build and configure.

Is it better to use a public cloud or a private cloud?

Sometimes business priorities change and the need to increase computing capacity outweighs security considerations.  Organisations with Private Cloud solutions can choose to utilise Public Cloud services, a Private and Hybrid cloud solution. For small businesses this could be as simple as running your normal businesses within Private Cloud infrastructure but utilising a cloud storage provider as a cheap way of storing archive documents.   Another example is a company that was having intermittent performance problems on a server which it turns out was due to running a huge and complex Excel spreadsheet.  By moving the spreadsheet to a Public Cloud service and allocating as much resources as they needed they could negate the performance issues on the server and also complete the spreadsheet processing much quicker. This utilisation of private and public clouds is a very simple example of Hybrid Cloud.

Hopefully this article on “What is Private Cloud” will have been useful and help you architect your own corporate cloud but of course every business is different and it isn’t always appropriate or necessary to shoe horn businesses into one specific approach. Why not give Your Office Anywhere a call and discuss the specific objectives in your business where IT plays a part and we can help you decide whether Private Cloud solutions can play a part.

Contact us today

Why not learn more about our private cloud services or alternatively you can fill out our online contact form and we will be in touch shortly. If you prefer to call you can call us on 01282 500318 for a no obligation chat.

Read our other related, useful posts

What Is Public Cloud?

What Is Hybrid Cloud?