The Case For and Against Private Clouds: Conclusion

For the past few weeks I've been discussing private clouds -- clouds devoted to a single entity. The very term private cloud is a bit loaded, in that some people feel that what one is really talking about is an internal cloud that is located in an organization's own data center. Others point out that a dedicated cloud can also be hosted by a hosting provider or an outsourcer; indeed, many hosting providers and outsourcers are scrambling to implement cloud environments, seeing public clouds as a threat that must be answered lest business slip away.

My view is that private cloud is probably a better term; however, one must be careful to distinguish the implementation location, as some aspects of a private cloud hosted externally differ from an internal counterpart. For example, it's likely that a formal contract containing an SLA will be in place with an external provider of a private cloud; negotiating and enforcing that SLA will probably be different than addressing an internal SLA.

In this post I'd like to summarize the series, draw some lessons, and offer some thoughts on what steps to take as you plan a private cloud implementation.

In terms of summing up, one factor to keep in mind is the "why" of private clouds: why does it make sense to consider implementing one?

The most important factor is that implementing a private cloud allows an IT organization to bypass many of the issues raised against public cloud services like Amazon EC2. First, one does not need to rely on the public cloud provider's security measures. Second, a private cloud, as mentioned just above, can provide for an SLA, whereas a public cloud may have an inadequate or non-existent SLA. Third, and quite critically, certain privacy issues that arise with public cloud use can be avoided; an example of this type of issue is the ability of the U.S. government to access an organization's data in a public cloud without the data owner knowing anything about the access. If the cloud is privately hosted, that unknown access is not an issue.

Also quite important is that implementing a private cloud offers an opportunity for IT to address some of the age-old criticisms it receives: IT is slow, unresponsive, paperwork-ridden. A private cloud enables business IT groups to provision compute resources in a matter of minutes, without any need for someone from the infrastructure groups to be involved at all.

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