Private cloud computing – emerging trend

Gartner’s official definition of cloud computing is “A style of computing, where scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities and metered by use service, that is delivered as a service to customers using internet technologies”. A private cloud is a form of cloud computing where the customer has some access limitations (hardware limitations or user access limitations) on the implementation of the service. Private cloud computing is increasing in usage due to concerns on security in public cloud offerings. While private cloud computing services can be delivered as platform-as-a-service (PaaS) or software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings, the majority of private cloud computing deployments are infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) level. Gartner says “Vendors are targeting this opportunity by repositioning its existing products (e.g., IBM's CloudBurst), acquiring smaller vendors (e.g., CA Technologies' acquisition of 3Tera and Cassatt), delivering new functionality (e.g., VMware's vCloud Director), and offering on-premises versions of public cloud offerings (e.g., Microsoft's Windows Azure Platform Appliance).” Private cloud computing can be hosted in house by an enterprise or externally hosted using third party infrastructure (virtual private cloud).

Essentially private cloud vendors would have an architecture that would provide customer interface to manage the services to which they have subscribed to and a service management interface that would help them manage their resources. The customer interface would allow customer to subscribe what service they want, manage their service and also manage their security settings. The service management interface would comprise of capacity management, configuration management, change management and incident problem management. These would be an overarching layer of their offering of PAAS (database, workflow, reporting and analytics) or IAAS (load balancing etc.).

The convergence of virtualization and real time infrastructure has also helped accelerate private cloud adoption. But private cloud computing adoption will continue to surface challenges as its enabling technologies are still immature and enterprises are still finding it difficult to understand the process of private cloud. Market for private cloud computing in the near future will be concentrated with many vendors providing public cloud computing, virtualization, grid computing will jump into the fray. Gartner provides the list of private cloud computing enabling vendors as shown below.



Finally private cloud computing offers lot of benefits to enterprise as its service is based on service delivery and usage metrics. Some form of standardization, automation in private cloud implementation and some form of resource pooling or virtualization might help the enterprise to reduce the cost.