Over the last few years, the number of infrastructure hosting options available to companies has multiplied. Once upon a time, the only real option was to build an onsite server room or data center.
Today, companies can choose from bare metal servers, cloud servers, platform-as-a-service products, and private clouds, among others. Today, we’d like to have a look at the last of these, focusing on what a private cloud is and when a business should consider using a custom private cloud.
What is a Private Cloud?
Each private cloud is a single-tenant server or cluster of servers running virtualization software. The virtualization layer provides virtual machines that, from the perspective of the user, are identical to ordinary cloud servers. A single organization has access to the physical hardware of a private cloud and only that organization can launch virtual servers on their private cloud.
A private cloud combines the benefits of bare metal dedicated servers and a public cloud platform. Like a bare metal server, the underlying resources are entirely at the disposal of a single client. Like a cloud platform, organizations can quickly launch and scale virtual servers.
What are the Advantages of a Private Cloud?
At heart, the main advantages of a private cloud are similar to those of a public cloud platform, with the additional capabilities that accompany total control over the resources of the physical hardware layer.
- Control and flexibility — Private clouds can be built to meet an organization’s requirements. Colohouse has been building bespoke infrastructure platforms for over a decade, and we bring that expertise and experience to our private cloud platform. Private clouds can be built to conform to the performance, scaling, and architecture requirements of each customer.
- Performance and scalability — The resources of a private cloud are entirely at the disposal of the cloud’s owner, removing any risk of resource or capacity contention. At the virtual layer, scaling is a simple as deploying and configuring new cloud servers. At the physical layer, new bare metal servers can be quickly added to increase the overall capacity of the cloud platform.
- Privacy and compliance — Public cloud platforms are secure, but they are multi-tenant infrastructure products, making them unsuitable for some applications. This becomes particularly important when an organization needs its cloud platform to comply with a regulatory framework, something that is easier when the physical infrastructure is private to the company.
Should Your Company Choose a Private Cloud?
At this point, you should have a good idea whether a private cloud is the right infrastructure solution for your company. If performance, privacy, and control are the most important factors for your project, a private cloud is a strong contender.
Private clouds can be used to run any application or service, including websites, web application backends, virtual desktop infrastructure, big data and machine learning applications, and databases. They are particularly suited for organizations that have diverse infrastructure needs that they would prefer to run on single-tenant hardware.
If you’d like to talk about how a custom private cloud would benefit your business, don’t hesitate to get in touch for a free consultation.
