gCLOUD3 | Turn-Key Private Cloud Computing

Defined: Private Cloud

Managed Service Providers and I.T. Service companies are now strongly focusing on the impact of cloud computing on their businesses, and trying not to let cloud computing marginalize their businesses. This can largely be explained by the fact that the rapid growth in the use of cloud services in recent years massively disrupts traditional IT delivery models.

Cloud computing typically includes scalability, elasticity, multi-tenancy, payment models that are linked to usage, resources delivered from virtualized environments and the provision of all support and management tasks by a cloud services provider. Cloud computing also in based upon service being hosted in a datacenter and requires an Internet connection to be able to use cloud computing environments.

There is an issue right now with the definition of the “private cloud” as it goes against the mainstream cloud computing model which does not believe in on premise infrastructure at all.
The emergence of the marketing term, ‘private cloud’ challenges common definitions of cloud computing and we have found it has been confusing MSPs and I.T. service providers.

Private clouds deliver IT resources from within the corporate firewall and to one customer. It is like providing a mini-datacenter to an individual client or can be used as multitenant infrastructure to host multiple clients in a datacenter. As more and more applications move to the cloud, there are a few things that need to be addressed.

First, there will always be a need for on-premise hardware to connect to the datacenter. One of the main issues with a private cloud in the datacenter is the user experience, as most SMB clients do not have adequate bandwidth to connect to the datacenter and it is just not cost effective. For example, dedicated 10 MB circuit to the datacenter could cost $1000s a month, and is outside of the budget of most SMB clients. The other issue is that most SMB clients have issues with putting their entire infrastructure in the cloud due to issues with the dependency on an Internet connection to be able to function. This week alone, Intuit’s cloud went down and caused over 300,000 clients to not have access to their applications. This really shows that the cloud in still evolving and no business should put their entire business in the cloud, and should look into private cloud solutions that are a hybrid of public and private cloud solutions.
Services that share the attributes of public cloud computing, have, of course been with us for many years.

In many ways, the use of public cloud services is creeping up on us by stealth and definitely save money, and allow SMBs to have applications they normally could not afford. The use of platforms, infrastructure, the private cloud,  delivered from the datacenter may seem to be comparatively immature, most people are using public cloud services. Each time we use Google’s search engine or a social networking tool such as Facebook or LinkedIn, we are using public cloud services. This leads me to my next point.

Private cloud allows for SMB clients to have the best of both worlds. They can still have local applications and files, backup to the cloud for disaster recovery, and allow for the public cloud to mature before they should even contemplate changing their entire infrastructure over completely to the public cloud. Public cloud can still work well for Hosted Exchange, CRM, and many other applications, but an infrastructure in the private cloud is not something that currently works well enough for SMB clients, and can actually cost more than an on premise private cloud due to datacenter costs.

So the real answer is public cloud works well for hosted applications, private cloud works well for infrastructure, especially when it comes to virtualizing servers and desktops. Private cloud is the cloud answer to the SMB for consolidation of infrastructure, and the ability to share resources to provide the same experience to each user, increased efficiency, and better reliability with high availability and fault tolerant solutions.
Private cloud might be confusing in definition, but the value of what private cloud brings is what really matters. Look at private cloud at an opportunity to provide even more to your client and drive down labor costs. The goal of private cloud is to allow an MSP to profit more due to reduced labor costs and more stickiness with your client, due to now having them locked into an infrastructure you are providing, instead of having a Dell of HP server, and workstations any I.T. company can support. The private cloud allows MSPs to distance themselves from their competition and provide solutions that are on demand, reliable, flexible, and cost effective.
Private cloud is not hype, it is a new way to offer virtualization in server centric computing, that can truly provide a platform that can be so flexible it can be run on-premise, and in the cloud in a disaster recovery scenario, due to virtualization standardization.

The SMB marketplace needs the private cloud, because it gives them an enterprise level of efficiency in their technology, with increased reliability, and unparalleled flexibility. The tradition environment of servers and workstations is just not cost effective anymore, from hardware costs, to administration costs to maintain.