Many of today’s IT departments are tasked with managing applications across multiple cloud platforms with complex IT architectures. They are also responsible for evaluating their current private cloud infrastructure to ensure that it meets the goals of their business. Truth be told, this is by no means easy. Private cloud services enable medium and large businesses to secure and protect applications that need to remain private while exploring ways to leverage the benefits of the public cloud in a hybrid approach. In Canada, the private cloud IaaS market in 2015 was estimated at $415 million (CAD) and this is expected to grow along with the public cloud in the years to come.
As the overall market matures the clear message is that hybrid cloud will be a suitable infrastructure model. Hosted private clouds will continue to deliver key benefits as shown below for enterprises as they move along the cloud journey.
- Security
Perhaps the biggest and most important benefit that businesses gain from the private cloud is security. According to recent statistics, as of December 2015, 22% of enterprises rated security as a key driver behind private clouds. In a private cloud, whether on-premise or deliver by a managed hosting provider, your data is stored on servers or virtual machines dedicated to you alone and no other entity has access to it. This is especially important for companies that deal with industries that have more stringent security requirements such as financial services, healthcare and certain public sector agencies. - Performance
A private cloud allows you to allocate the resources on the infrastructure with more certainty. It is more predictable in terms of computing performance and avoids the ‘noisy neighbor’ effect in that you have visibility of the resources. That said, capacity planning plays an important role to allow for growth, but this can be complemented with the public cloud as well if that is an acceptable solution. - Control
Private cloud naturally provides more control for your applications that run your business. This certainly applies to server resources, but it also relates to cost. In a private cloud, there is a finite amount of resources which allows you to avoid surprise costs that can pop up with public clouds that aren’t managed well or have poor governance. While fully virtualized you can still plan when to increase the utilization of the infrastructure with a predictable model from your hosting provider. - Flexibility and customization
Managed private cloud services by nature allow for more flexibility and customization. Depending on your application profile and your confidence with demand characteristics, the appropriate infrastructure can be deployed to meet current and anticipated needs. If scaling to a public cloud is acceptable, with a private cloud deployment you don’t have to build for the peaks. If public cloud isn’t an option for security reasons then a logical compromise can be designed to meet the need for scale.
Private clouds have a solid place in enterprise IT and will continue to be an effective deployment model. The key is to take a holistic approach to the needs of your business. Take advantage of the predictability that private clouds bring and leverage a hybrid strategy when it makes sense to improve security and performance while managing costs.
Carbon60 manages private clouds for organizations that prefer to leave the infrastructure headaches to us so they can focus on their applications and innovation to grow their core business. Contact us today for secure, reliable and flexible private cloud options for your business.