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The path to a private cloud is often driven by the need to maintain control of the service delivery environment because of application maturity, performance requirements, industry or government regulatory controls, or business differentiation reasons. For example, banks and governments have data security issues that may preclude the use of currently available public cloud services. Private cloud options include:
- Self-hosted Private Cloud: A Self-hosted Private Cloud provides the benefit of architectural and operational control, utilizes the existing investment in people and equipment, and provides a dedicated on-premise environment that is internally designed, hosted, and managed.
- Hosted Private Cloud: A Hosted Private Cloud is a dedicated environment that is internally designed, externally hosted, and externally managed. It blends the benefits of controlling the service and architectural design with the benefits of datacenter outsourcing.
- Private Cloud Appliance: A Private Cloud Appliance is a dedicated environment that procured from a vendor, is designed by that vendor with provider/market driven features and architectural control, is internally hosted, and externally or internally managed. It blends the benefits of using predefined functional architecture, lower deployment risk with the benefits of internal security and control.
A private cloud is a software-defined data center that combines essential hardware and other computing resources into a unified virtualized unit. A private cloud’s layer of hardware and networking abstraction – again, provided by software – enables enterprises to scale and provision resources more dynamically than is possible with traditional hardware-centric computing environments.
In contrast to public cloud computing, a private cloud is typically hosted within a company’s firewalls. Alternately, some companies host their private cloud with an external third party provider, which allows these deployments to tap into external compute resources on an on-demand basis.
Ideally, a private cloud allows businesses significant cost savings over legacy hardware-based deployments. It also enables far greater flexibility, and in contrast to a public cloud much greater security and privacy.
Private Cloud Challenges
Despite its significant promise, a private cloud faces challenges. As with traditional deployments, companies must still handle (or pay for) the majority of achitecting and monitoring work themselves. And because private cloud is still emerging technology, a deployment built this year will likely soon call for a revision of some type. For this reason (among others) businesses of varying sizes are opting for hybrid clouds – a term that comprises any number of permutations of private and public clouds.To be sure, the world of private cloud computing suffers from a phenomenon that few vendors will admit: confusion. Sure, the term private cloud can be defined, yet vendors and pundits tend to disagree on the specifics. For a time, merely using virtualization in your data center meant you had a private cloud; other experts point out that this is only the foundation.
This confusion comes to the fore when businesses go shopping for a private cloud solution. Do you want a full-fledged third party infrastructure as a service solution, or do you simply want to virtualize, say, your southwestern offices? Issues like tiered staff access, control of databases, scheduled provisioning, and application management can quickly spiral into a labyrinthine (and costly) array of choices.
So when planning and building a private cloud – either completely in-house or with any level of vendor involvement – businesses must keep their own goals squarely in place. Why, exactly, are you constructing a new private cloud; what do you want it to do? Looking past the blizzard of choices, the answer to this question is best placed at the very top of your private cloud architecture plan.
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| As cloud computing proliferates, private clouds are typically part of a hybrid cloud deployment. (Source: Appistry) |
In-House or Third Party Private Cloud?
Before building a private cloud, a business must decide: do we want to run it in our own data center, or host it in a third party location?An externally hosted private cloud is often referred to as a managed private cloud.
The concept of an external private cloud causes anxiety among businesses for good reason. The core rationale a private cloud is so prized is because it offers greater security, privacy and control than a public cloud. So locating a private cloud in an external facility seems to negate this. Among the worries: The issue of data ownership. If, for instance, your private cloud host changes its end users agreements in some onerous way, how easy will it be for you to shift to a new provider?
Also worrying is the possibility of a breach in security. While cloud service providers are better positioned to keep up with evolving security trends due to economies of scale, what happens when something goes wrong? Will the service provider accept accountability? Will they make you whole after, say, a data breach, or will you be left to clean up the mess and shoulder the costs?
Why then host your private cloud externally? Industry opinions differ wildly, but some pundits say that a business must have at least 1,000 servers to justify building its own private cloud. Many businesses don’t have near that amount. Hence the interest in hosting a private cloud with a third party provider, or in some way leveraging a managed private cloud from an external vendor.
In truth, a hosted private cloud the managed private cloud – is far different than a public cloud from a big public cloud vendor like, say, Amazon. In a managed private cloud scenario, a business extends a separate security perimeter around this third party cloud.
In effect, your business simply cordons off a section of the third party’s equipment and infrastructure. This saves your business the cash outlay of building/buying this extra equipment and infrastructure, yet also provides (in theory, at least) the same level of privacy and security as would a truly in-house deployment. Many managed clouds enable you to boost your security, allowing you to move specific apps (say, those applicable to mobile workers) into the private cloud; and you can often consume "security as a service," such as BYOD (bring your own device) security and DLP (data loss prevention) services.
Naturally, your business must select a managed private cloud provider that includes the necessary regulatory compliance security practices to meet rigorous industry standards.
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| A private cloud comprises a unified, integrated software-defined data center – whether in a company's in-house data center or in an external facility. |
Private Cloud and Virtualization
The terms private cloud and virtualization are often used as synonyms. Many companies take the approach that, if they have virtualized their computing resources, they have implemented a private cloud.In truth, this isn’t precisely correct.
Virtualization is technology that separates – that abstracts – the hardware from the operating system and applications (and other resources) that reside on that hardware. This technology has revolutionized the date center. Among many changes, it enables companies to make vastly more efficient use of their server hardware.
Traditionally (say, several years back), server use has been very inefficient. Only a small percentage of a server’s compute power – perhaps 15 percent, or even less – was employed at a given time. Adding to the inefficiency, a single server would be dedicated to a single operating system and/or a single application.
This inefficiency wasn’t a terrible problem: Server hardware is relatively inexpensive commodity hardware. So data center administrators would simply keep buying more boxes as the company’s compute needs grew. When companies needed to add applications, or run various operating systems simultaneously (or versions of the same OS), they simply purchased more servers. In truth, this got costly, in energy costs as well as monitoring and maintenance costs.
Virtualization first led at the enterprise level by the success of VMware – dramatically changed this. Virtualization optimizes hardware utilization by enabling multiple operating systems and applications to run on a single box. Virtualization enables creation of virtual machines (VM) – “machines” that are in fact software environments existing on the underlying hardware. Virtualization isolates the virtual machines (which may run various operating systems and apps) from one another and from the physical hardware or network.
Consequently, virtualization is a huge cost saver – it’s no surprise that businesses have rushed to deploy virtualization in the datacenter. Note that it was large enterprises equipped with hefty budgets that first rushed to virtualize – for them it was a no-brainer. Smaller and mid-sized companies have been slower to virtualize, because while virtualization provides longer term advantages, initial set-up presents cost and operational headaches.
A virtualized platform provides a datacenter admin with an array of tools to better manage – and often more securely manage – IT resources. The percentage of utilized server compute power jumps markedly; in some cases to the 70-80 percent range. Realize, too, that much more than just servers can be virtualized: storage, networks, applications – many of the elements of IT infrastructure can be virtualized.
This is why IT experts extoll the virtues of the virtualized data center. The old-fashioned hardware-centric data center (which continues to dominate IT) is cumbersome and prone to obsolescence by comparison.
However, virtualization, for all its advantages, isn’t by itself a private cloud. To be sure, virtualization is a necessary foundation for a private cloud. But for a virtualized workload to truly be a private cloud, a company needs to standardize and automate its various workloads. Implicit in the concept of a private cloud is dynamic provisioning and a single pane management of a heterogeneous set of applications. (Not to mention the ability to charge specific business units for the resources they consume. Chargeback is a key advantage of the cloud.)
In short, the visual image of cloud comes into play here: a series of silos built on disparate hardware needs to be turned into a fully integrated and automated computing environment, just as an actual cloud in the sky combines an array of meteorological elements (moisture, temperature) into a single unit – albeit one that changes constantly.
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| A private cloud involves virtualizing many aspects of data center operation. (Source: CRMNext) |
If you talk with consultants who work with clients setting up private clouds, you soon hear horror stories. Businesses rush to get on board with a private cloud and virtualization – they’ve heard of the cost savings – but they don’t really know why.
But hurry, let’s build it!
For instance, one IT department in a northeastern US state (which will remain nameless) spent millions building a state-of-the-art private cloud. And what did the organization do with it? “Oh, we have a few divisions that would like to use it for their apps,” was how a consultant explained its use, noting how amazingly wasteful this is. Unfortunately, this story isn’t an isolated example.
So at the risk of repeating the point, a business that’s weighing deploying a private cloud needs a concrete, well-considered cloud strategy – before starting. It needs to be sure it has a clear answer to (at least) the following extended question:
1) What are the technical needs and requirements of your current IT infrastructure?
2) What specs will be require in the new private cloud; that is, how robust and full-featured must it be?
3) What precise tasks must the private cloud be capable of, and what return on investment will this capability enable?
4) And (summing up the previous three) How will you measure the success or failure of this deployment
Other factors to consider as you develop your private cloud strategy:
Security: It’s generally accepted that the private cloud is significantly more secure than a public cloud. Yet in fact this is highly debatable.
A Forrester study indicated that in the last 18 months more than 50 percent of the companies surveyed had suffered a security breach. Which brings to mind a full range of legal and compliance issues; how will you handle sensitive user information and financial documents in your private cloud deployment?
And consider this: A big cloud provider's security budget probably far outweighs yours. They'll add the newest security technologies quicker than you can. They'll find and patch vulnerabilities more quickly than you can. They've seen more threats and know what to do about them, and they likely have a bigger, more talented security staff.
Bottom line: define a clear private cloud security policy ahead of time – with full awareness of sticky legal and compliance issues – knowing that the fewer personnel with access, the better.
Application and Network Suitability: If your data center has been around a few years, not every element of your IT infrastructure may be capable of making the leap to a private cloud.
If, for instance, you have a legacy application built in-house (by developers who are long gone) that resides on an aging Unix system, porting this to a private cloud may be more headaches than it’s worth. How about that 1990’s era network you run for your company’s northern region? (The one held together by duct tape.) Can it be virtualized?
Bottom line: Make a complete and clear-eyed inventory of all your compute resources, to see what can and cannot be integrated into your private cloud. Be aware that some companies have more than one private cloud, and that companies run private clouds that incorporate only a portion of their IT resources.
Your Company’s Staff: This is a tough one. Running a private cloud in-house is notoriously difficult; it takes an entire host of skills and expertise, from network performance analysts to virtualization pros to IT security gurus.
The level of skills required is what prompts many companies to host their private cloud in a third party resource center. In effect, the client company simply extends its firewall and regulatory efforts around this remote facility; a datacenter some hundreds of miles away becomes a “private” facility. The need for skilled staff is also what makes many companies hire high-priced consultants to augment in-house IT pros.
Bottom line: Your decision about staffing – whether you have the right staff, or can afford to hire them – is probably the most critical aspect of your private cloud planning.
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