Private Clouds

June 2009

Over the past three years there has been a significant change in technology and internet services delivery. The term 'Cloud', which is used to depict the Internet in computer network diagrams, now incorporates a concept of computing services that are delivered via the Internet. The most prominent of these being Saas, software as a service; PaaS, platform as a service; IaaS, infrastructure as a service.

Cloud computing is broadly a hosted service provision, whereby the customer rents use of a particular application or service rather than own it themselves. The obvious benefits are capital expenditure savings; hardware, software, licensing, infrastructure and management overhead.  You only pay for the resources consumed which are often covered by service level agreements and users can generally terminate the contract at any time, thus avoiding ROI risks. It is secure, scalable and reliable.

However, there are current industry debates regarding the strategic shift of the use of information technology. As IT is becoming more standardised and less expensive the cloud model might not make such fiscal sense within larger organisations. In situations where the capital expense would be relatively small such organisations might actually pay more for operating expenses. Other impacting factors might include the efficiency of company data centre compared to cloud vendors, existing operation costs, level of adoption, data security policies, limitations and type of functionality being hosted.

In these circumstances a private cloud might be the route to take. A virtual environment hosted on your own systems that delivers the benefits and cost savings, but with all of the control.