The Private Cloud What Is Cloud Computing

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Cloud computing can have two very different meanings. The first: The use of any service delivered via the Internet in real time, by the likes of Amazon's EC2 to software as a service.

The second: describes the technologies and architecture needed to offer cloud services. The popular choice for many businesses at the moment is private cloud computing, where companies in effect build their own in house cloud, instead of using a service provider like Amazon or Google. The idea is that you get all the scalability, metering, and time-to-market benefits of a public cloud service without giving up control, security, and recurring costs to a service provider.

http://www.infoworld.com/t/cloud-computing/what-the-private-cloud-really-means-463

What is A Private Cloud

Private cloud is a computing system that delivers hosted services to users on a LAN behind a firewall. The same as with other cloud models, a Private cloud is made up of pools of virtual machines that sit on high end servers that are capable of virtualisation. But with the private cloud, the services that are been offered in cloud can only be accessed by a single company, which gives greater control and security. This single could host a private cloud themselves or choose to outsource this to a third party company.

(Industry perspectives 2010)

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/04/19/a-guide-to-managing-private-clouds/

The Difference between the Private Cloud and Virtualization

Many people see the private cloud as the same thing as virtualization, but they could not be more wrong. What makes virtualization different from private cloud computing? Virtualization is another factor that makes cloud computing possible. Although the private cloud is possible without virtualisation, it would cost a lot more money any hardware to provide a few services. True private clouds, are not only virtualized, but also include monitoring, management, and automation

(Intel 2012)

http://docs.media.bitpipe.com/io_10x/io_100683/item_428385/Intel_sServerVirtualization_IO%23100683_E-Guide_062811.pdf

Why the Private cloud is winning over Businesses

Small and large businesses are beginning to take advantage of the private because it makes their everyday operations less complicated and more cost-effective. Below are some of key factors that are attracting businesses:

Safety

Public cloud technology is seen to be fairly secure, but many businesses still fear having their private data been stored in a datacenter that is been accesses by a public resource such as the internet. The Maintenance and security of public clouds is solely done by a third-party service provider. This can ease the work load on a business, however it takes away the control a business has over its own data. Creating a private cloud gives the business total control of their data and services by storing on site, giving greater privacy and security.

Reliability

Public clouds rarely ever suffer any down time, but there is always the risk of some unforeseen incident that may cause down time. "Amazon, one of the power players in public cloud storage, once experienced a down period of eight hours in 2008". Relying on a third-party server provider to gain access to your data can be of concern if frequent periods of down time are possible especially if you run a production environment. A private cloud can suffer just as much down time as a public cloud, but you control this down time which can give better reliability.

Flexibility

The greatest benefit of hosting your own private cloud is the flexibility you have with it. Private clouds can be built to exactly meet your needs. Public cloud are capable of providing many different types of services, however a public cloud is not built with a particular users needs in mind and must be customized for each user, which might not always be possible. Building your own private cloud would require a very experienced IT team and a large investment would be needed for the maintenance and monitoring like Microsoft’s System Center 2012 suite Many businesses are enjoying the security and control that is brought about by building your own private cloud system.

(Altnam 2012)

http://www.business2community.com/tech-gadgets/three-reasons-private-clouds-are-winning-over-the-business-world-0362241

Private Cloud Management

Traditionally all tasks within an IT department had to be done manually, like building new Server’s and installing Operating systems and applications. The emergence of the private cloud has brought about the change of every day manual tasks been automated with their likes of System Center’s 2012 product Orchestrator. Orchestrator allows automated tasks to be run throughout your network and as I was told by a Microsoft employee "If you can plan it on paper then Orchestrator can do it".

With your private cloud been managed by System Center 2012, you can give relieve the workload on your IT department by allowing employees to perform simple tasks that would take up a lot of IT departments time like installing software or requesting a virtual machine.

(Martin Perlin 2012)

http://www.evolven.com/blog/private-cloud-management-challenges.html

Reasons Why Private Cloud Adoption Initiatives Fail

It makes sense to implement a private cloud as fast as possible, consideration must be made towards the needs of the users and buisnesses demands. When companies implement private clouds without thinking through the company’s and user’s needs, it usually ends in disaster.

"There are some large companies that can get a cloud up and running fast. And some have done that, and then are disappointed that the company doesn't adopt it or users don't adopt it or costs actually go up, not down, and provisioning takes longer, not less, time," says Jay Seaton, chief marketing officer at GlassHouse Technologies. And so a lot of what we're seeing is if a cloud is set up without the right objectives or without the right configurations and all of the pieces that go behind that, then bad things happen and people are disappointed."

Seeing large companies fail at implementing private clouds, made the conversion of private clouds slower than was predicted several years ago. Some software vendors claim they could develop a cloud in a matter of days, but deploying applications is not what’s important with private clouds, it’s how effective the cloud is any whether it actual meets the company’s needs. Below are 4 reasons for failure:

IT departments views cloud and virtualization as the same

Many believe Cloud is just a new buzz word for virtualization, as I explained above virtualization is just a technology that helps make the private cloud possible. IT departments should state the difference between cloud environments and virtualized ones. This will allow a better understanding of objectives that are desired from a private cloud deployment

User expectations are skewed

IT may meet user opposition to private cloud initiatives not just on deployment but also at conception due to the hype surrounding the "ease" of public cloud computing. The best way for technologists to get users on board with private and hybrid cloud initiatives is through long-running expectation setting and a little bit of marketing finesse.

(Ericka Chickowski 2012)

IT never takes customers into account.

This education and marketing campaign among users may be stymied, though, by an adversarial relationship between business users and IT.

"[What] we run into a lot is user departments and users that are so cynical about IT that the view is if it is a private cloud and IT is running it, then it will reduce my productivity," says Seaton. "We definitely see a lot of divided camps of people looking for any reason to bypass IT."

Often this cynicism is borne from a "geeks know what's best" mentality. This IT tone deafness can kill a public cloud initiative more thoroughly than any kind of technology failure. Unfortunately, it's a slow death that typically comes after investment and long deployment hours.

"We've seen cloud implementation plans for various companies across all the verticals take anywhere from between six months to 12 months and then fail because they weren't implemented in collaboration with their business consumers," says Copas.

He adds that as with many IT initiatives, private clouds depend on healthy business cultures where IT departments aren't technology-centric cost centers but customer-centric business partners.

"That means changing the attitude of the IT department from 'We know what you need and we'll just give it to you' to 'You tell us what you need and we'll build it and enable it for you,'" he explains.

4. IT creates an all-you-can-eat buffet.

One of the key differentiators between virtualized computing and cloud computing is the capability to granularly meter departmental and individual usage and employ effective chargeback models to charge business units exactly for what they consume. Unfortunately, many business don't build charge back into their models, largely as a function of the aforementioned IT-centric decision-making.

"Sometimes they don't put any thought into a chargeback model, and so they provide the end user the ability to create these services that are defined in an IT verbiage versus business verbiage and if they don't have any type of chargeback involved, what they really have created is an all-you-can-eat free buffet," says Copas. "So the end user just goes out and creates things at a whim; there's no cost to them, and they end up with this huge virtual server sprawl."

http://www.networkcomputing.com/PRIVATE-CLOUD-TECH-CENTER/four-reasons-private-cloud-adoption-init/240002030?pgno=2

Private storage cloud

For a small business, the public storage cloud is the best option because it will entail no capital expenditure. Moreover, with a limited IT budget, a small business can use a third-party vendor like Amazon or Google to get adequate data security. However, for an enterprise, the private storage cloud is always a better choice. Here’s why:

The enterprise can use its own IT infrastructure and skilled personnel. Although the number of dedicated people required will still be fewer than with traditional storage, use of in-house personnel with knowledge of company culture and requirements enhances the experience for the end consumer.

With a private storage cloud, the enterprise can ensure that its proprietary best practices are applied to the storage and its use. Also, this will ensure that all regulatory requirements are followed and auditable.

Cloud computing technology is still developing and lacks industry standards. Placing valuable enterprise data with one public storage cloud provider to then find you are dissatisfied with the service is going to cause problems that will ultimately incur time and money to resolve. Private storage clouds, which are based on existing enterprise IT, prevent such vendor lock-in.

Finally, there have been several data breaches and outages in public clouds recently. With a private storage cloud, data security is the responsibility of enterprise IT, which has a greater sense of ownership, accountability and personal stake in the matter.

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/networking/private-storage-cloud-if-you-build-it-they-will-come/5543?tag=content;siu-container

(techrepublic 2012)

System Center 2012: Tighter integration between private cloud components