The building blocks of private clouds

The private cloud has come a long way, having gained significant traction in the market. Public cloud vendors who once criticised the private cloud as a ‘false cloud’ or as an oxymoron are now providing features for interoperability with private cloud platforms.

The decision to build your own cloud is a strategic one, which requires stakeholders to think about the many inhouse resources required to sustain such infrastructure. It is the need of the hour for IT organisations to enable self- service, and become on-demand providers of infrastructure, platforms and applications for their internal business units. Speed and agility, not cost reduction, drive private cloud implementations.

Various cloud service providers offer the building blocks for a private cloud infrastructure–virtualisation (hypervisors such as ESXi, Xen, etc), self-service, metering or chargeback and automated workflow management.