A cloud computing platform that operates behind the corporate firewall and within control of the organisation's IT department may be termed a private cloud. In this article, the author makes a case for private clouds and their impact on the future of clou

Typical IT environments consist of compute, storage and network resources duplicated across many business units in the same organisation. Often, resources are under-utilised and wasted due to overprovisioning, or application performance suffers due to the under-provisioning of resources.

Cloud computing includes a spectrum of many deployment models. Some thought leaders call the private cloud a marketing term for a proprietary computing architecture to work with the existing data centre resources for better utilisation and agility, while others have realised the importance of the private or internal cloud.

The private cloud offers several benefits such as automation, self-service, agility, efficiency, security, better resource utilisation, and faster time to market. A combination of the public and private or virtual private cloud models can be used to address different requirements. So let’s look at why the private cloud is really a cloud, and how the future scenario in the cloud space will depend on the increasing adoption of the private cloud.

Highly reliable and fault tolerant infrastructure is the solid base of a private cloud. Its deployment captures the essential characteristics of public and partner-hosted clouds. Private clouds allow organisations to maintain total control over their infrastructure, applications and data. They deliver many benefits of the public cloud such as agility, faster time to market, automation, elasticity, higher levels of overall application availability, reliability, self-service, scalability within a limited range and pooling of shared infrastructure.

So if public cloud service providers can deliver services efficiently and realise all the benefits mentioned earlier, why can’t organisations themselves achieve the same results, with existing expertise, investment in resources and the availability of private cloud products that can help them build a cloud environment behind the firewall, and with complete control?

The private cloud provides cloud infrastructure in-house, ensures the organisation has control of resources, besides ensuring more security, privacy and compliance to regulatory requirements. It also needs capital investment and expertise to build and maintain a private cloud infrastructure.