The Case for Private Clouds

If you've been reading this series, you now have a better understanding of the much-discussed term "private cloud." In the previous two parts of this series, I described the features and service capabilities of private clouds. In particular, I noted that the move to private cloud computing requires the separation of infrastructure provisioning and business application resource consumption. In essence, a private cloud requires that resource requests and provisioning must interact as service requests and responses in an automated environment, avoiding any manual intervention.

Now I want to focus on benefits and challenges of a private cloud implementation. This week, I will discuss the "pros" of private clouds; next week, I will turn to the "cons."

Obviously, there's a lot of excitement about cloud computing. Many organizations are considering private clouds as the primary method to achieve cloud computing benefits. As an aside, private clouds are also sometimes known as internal, although a strong case can be made that the benefits of an internal cloud can also be obtained through a cloud provider, akin to a hosting service.

Since I've covered the overall benefits of cloud computing before, I won't repeat them here. There are many of them, which is why so many IT organizations are interested in the topic. Assuming you want to implement cloud computing and achieve those benefits, why does a private cloud make sense? The main advantages:

1. A private cloud leverages existing infrastructure With some incremental investment, a company's existing data center can be made cloud-capable. Almost every organization has large amounts of installed equipment, much of it of recent vintage. Many of these organizations also have recently gone through significant data center upgrades or expansions. Turning to external cloud providers would require scrapping the installed base of equipment, necessitating a write-off-no music to the CFO's ears.

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