Private Clouds

The number and maturity of on-premise private cloud options continue to increase. From OpenStack-based options like Rackspace's private cloud to PAAS options like CloudFoundry, for those organizations seeking to make use of existing infrastructure or for whom an increased level of control is needed over off-premise cloud, then these solutions are well worth a look.

The need for physically storing data within nations or organizations has increased significantly in recent years. There is concern around sensitivity of information hosted in cloud environments. Organizations are looking into private cloud as an alternative when data that needs to be housed in close proximity with control over access and distribution. Private cloud offers cloud infrastructure provisioned for exclusive use by a single organization with the following characteristics; on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity and measured service.

Because of concerns over privacy and security, or a need to repurpose existing hardware investments, many businesses are choosing to implement their own private cloud. There are are a variety of products, both open source and commercial for this purpose, but it should be noted that compute, storage, and network management are only the starting points for a useful private cloud. There are many services and processes that must be custom implemented to provide a cloud facility that rivals the public offerings from Amazon, Rackspace, or others.