There are three general cloud deployment models: public, private, and hybrid.
A public cloud is delivered through an independent, third-party vendor. Most popularly, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure dominate the market for public cloud. Companies like these maintain compute resources that their customers can utilize when needed. Businesses who use the public cloud share these resources. This is commonly referred to as a “multi-tenant” environment.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, a business can create, own, operate, and maintain their own private cloud. While there is more security in this format, on-premises cloud architectures aren’t always the most flexible or scalable because the organization must depend on the resources they already have rather than a third-party vendor’s resources.
Many businesses have realized the benefits of both public and private clouds, and have thus moved on to adopt a hybrid cloud model. In this architecture, a private cloud connects with a public cloud, letting businesses run workloads in both worlds. Commonly, the business will primarily use their private cloud environment, and then “burst” into the public cloud when needed. For a hybrid cloud model to work, there must be a high level of compatibility between the software that runs the clouds and the services used in both.
While there are key benefit differences between private, public, and hybrid clouds, a private cloud, on its own, does offer some of the main features you’ll see in a public cloud. Namely, businesses can still enjoy self-service, scalability, the ability to provision and configure virtual machines (VMs), scale resources up and down when needed, and automation to help simplify tasks.
Not to mention, organizations can implement chargeback tools to track computing usage and ensure the business only pays for the resources or services they’re actually using.
What are the Challenges of Private Cloud?
Despite the advantages of private cloud, there are multiple limitations that cannot be ignored. In the next section, we will explore how to address and overcome these challenges.
Inflexible architecture
Your private cloud may need to adapt to a variety of application needs from traditional enterprise applications to cloud native applications. Inflexible infrastructure software and 3-tier architectures can make that difficult.
Complex data services
Enterprise environments typically have a need for a private cloud with block and file storage services in addition to the object storage common in the public cloud. Meeting those needs may require deploying and managing different hardware for each data service, adding cost and complexity. Separate storage pools decrease overall capacity utilization and limit flexibility. With data playing such a critical role in digital transformation, the importance of addressing this challenge shouldn’t be overlooked.
Vendor exclusivity
Private clouds running on legacy infrastructure have yet another issue: They’re locked into the virtualization provider. Regardless of the vendor or the hypervisor, customers will find themselves unwillingly glued to a single vendor’s products.
Too much of a good thing
Despite the control a private cloud can provide, vendors may package multiple products, create unneeded deployment and managerial complexity, and ultimately, create “shelfware.” Not to mention, businesses will experience high IT expenses thanks to licensing fees, ELAs, and more.
Multiple layers
To connect to the public cloud, businesses will need to add another software layer that is not natively integrated. Larger enterprises with multiple IT teams and specialists may be more likely to build private clouds, but the team overall will struggle with complex, ineffective tools.
Brittle automation
A private cloud with an inflexible architecture and complex data services inevitably makes automation harder. As a result, it is more time consuming to create automations, automation failures are more likely, and troubleshooting and maintenance is more complex.
Though private cloud has its benefits, especially in regards to security, many businesses don’t intend on only using an on-prem cloud, hoping instead to expand to a hybrid or multicloud architecture in the future. That said, many IT decision makers have to pause that goal due to major budget constraints, keeping them from preparing for the multicloud operating model.
That’s why it’s important businesses make sure their underlying infrastructure is well-suited to support your hybrid and multicloud initiatives, or, if they intend on sticking with a private cloud long-term, that the infrastructure delivers public cloud-like power and flexibility into the on-prem environment. But ultimately, the separate storage, servers, virtualization, and networking components in legacy, 3-tier architecture are the root of the issue.
With hyperconverged infrastructure, these separate components merge, eliminating silos. Indeed, this architectural solution supports the private cloud paradigm, providing:
- Reliable security configurations and audits
- Data-at-rest encryption
- Micro-segmentation
- Built-in data protection, backup, and disaster recovery
- Rapid, non-disrupted deployment
- IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS)
- Reduced operating expenses and improved ROI
Nowadays, about 52% of organizations run on some form of a private cloud. But this majority, according to recent research, is set to grow even further. In a recent IDC study, researchers found that 80% of organizations had moved applications out of the public cloud and back onto their private cloud. They also found that within the next 2 years, 50% of all public cloud applications will move back on-premises. What can account for that switch?
In nearly all cases, the reason came down to cost savings. In a separate study, IDC also found that predictable workloads, which account for the majority of all enterprise workloads, on average were about twice as expensive to run in the public cloud as than on-premises. There’s security and predictability in a private cloud, leading many organizations to opt for the cost-saving benefits of running their own cloud architecture in-house.
Designing an effective private cloud requires careful planning and consideration of your current and future needs and priorities. A private cloud for enterprise needs should be built on a foundation that can provide self-service capabilities, app-centric security, and reliable data protection, disaster recovery, and automation.
A proper foundation with those capabilities can help solve the two biggest pressing needs for any enterprise to succeed in the digital economy:
- Increase IT efficiency
- Enable digital innovation
A properly designed private cloud helps address both of these needs. Increasing IT efficiency is a prerequisite for accelerating innovation. A successful private cloud will free up budget. In most enterprises, traditional IT still consumes the majority of the IT budget, leaving only a small percentage to dedicate to innovation. Gartner reported that traditional IT accounted for 81% of spending on average, with just 19% going to cloud spending. Traditional spending is forecast to drop to 72% by 2022. If you can drive down spending by shifting workloads from traditional IT to private cloud, more budget becomes available to allocate elsewhere.
Frees up staff time. If your IT staff spends all of its time on infrastructure management tasks like provisioning, updates, data protection, and troubleshooting to address operational requirements and satisfy user requests, that leaves very little time or focus for innovation. Rationalizing and automating operations with a private cloud and enabling self-service so that developers and other users can satisfy more of their needs themselves can get your team off the treadmill.
Finally, it eliminates complexity. Traditional IT environments often have silos of dedicated compute and storage infrastructure around important applications like databases, an approach that is both complex and inefficient. Silos of storage for unstructured data—including file shares and object storage —add to operational complexity. Established enterprises may have heterogeneous infrastructure and technical debt dating back years. This is not only expensive, it’s a substantial barrier to innovation.
Unless you can remove the friction from your on-premises operations, your digital transformation will never be complete, and your business objectives will remain at risk.
Having a well-architected private cloud will make your hybrid cloud deployment easier and help ensure success if needed at a later time. Some of the reasons for this are just common sense. If your private cloud is burdened by the challenges mentioned earlier, IT is going to have a lot less time to devote to hybrid cloud as well. Hybrid applications that are dependent on services from your private cloud will suffer the effects of its limitations, especially performance, automation, or integration challenges.
The right private cloud solution should actively facilitate integration with the public cloud. This includes tools for copying, replicating, or migrating VMs and data from one location to another, support for different hypervisors, and the ability to support both VMs and containers. By choosing the right private cloud solution, you effectively create an on-ramp to the hybrid cloud that makes hybrid operations easier and more cost effective, delivering better results.
“With Nutanix, we can now focus on delivering services to our business units, not managing our data center.”
“A hyperconvergence solution was the perfect middle ground between the traditional architecture and a private cloud, balancing the cost-effectiveness and convenience.”
“One of the biggest benefits of Nutanix is that it truly is an integrated system that simplifies management across all of our locations.”
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