Going Public or Private

I was asked recently on why you should choose a private cloud, rather than a public cloud.

They may be very similar, and you may want to ask yourself why you would consider a private cloud instead of a public cloud. Take a note if some of these reasons fit your business:

1)      Your organization has already a large datacenter with spare capacity. The existing applications your run in the datacenter would be expensive to move to a public cloud.

2)      You offer IT services to a huge ecosystem of both customers and partners.

3)      Security and trust. You need to protect your lifeblood behind your organizations own firewalls.

4)      and compliance. Do you need to have your data in accordance with these rules?

5)      Performance requirements. Some of the applications and/or services may not perform that well in a public cloud, especially the LOB applications that need to perform in real-time.

Some people (at least every journalist) are mixing up the definitions of the cloud. And they are not able to see the difference between private and public.

I would say that a private cloud is a highly virtualized datacenter located inside your organizations firewalls. It`s something that you own, and manage by yourself.

The rest of the characteristics are as follows:

·         You can allow IT to provision services, applications, infrastructure to internal users in a self-service manner

·         Automated management tasks

·         A well-managed environment

·         Optimized use of computing resources

·         Support specifics workloads that your business requires

·         Self-service based provisioning of hardware and software resources

Key terms: scalability, self-servicing, elasticity. The major difference is the control over the environment.