Private Cloud

Private clouds are cloud environments solely dedicated to the end user, usually within the user’s firewall. Although private clouds traditionally ran on-premise, organizations are now building private clouds on rented, vendor-owned data centers located off-premise. All clouds become private clouds when the underlying IT infrastructure is dedicated to a single customer with completely isolated access.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Private Cloud

Advantages of a private cloud
The main advantage of a private cloud is that users don't share resources. Because of its proprietary nature, a private cloud computing model is best for businesses with dynamic or unpredictable computing needs that require direct control over their environments, typically to meet security, business governance or regulatory compliance requirements.

When an organization properly architects and implements a private cloud, it can provide most of the same benefits found in public clouds, such as user self-service and scalability, as well as the ability to provision and configure virtual machines (VMs) and change or optimize computing resources on demand. An organization can also implement chargeback tools to track computing usage and ensure business units pay only for the resources or services they use.

In addition to those core benefits inherent to both cloud deployment models, private clouds also offer:

• Increased security of an isolated network.
• Increased performance due to resources being solely dedicated to one organization.
• Increased capability for customization.

Disadvantages of a private cloud
Private clouds also have some disadvantages. First, private cloud technologies, such as increased automation and user self-service, can bring some complexity to an enterprise. These technologies typically require an IT team to rearchitect some of its data center infrastructure, as well as adopt additional management tools. As a result, an organization might have to adjust or even increase its IT staff to successfully implement a private cloud. They can also be expensive; often, when a business owns its private cloud, it bears all the acquisition, deployment, support and maintenance costs involved.

Hosted private clouds, while not outright owned by the user, can also be costly. The service provider takes care of basic network maintenance and configuration in a hosted deployment, which means the user needs to subscribe and pay regularly for that offered service. This can end up being more expensive than the upfront cost of complete ownership in the long run, and sacrifices some of the control over maintenance that complete ownership guarantees. Although users will still be operating in a single-tenant environment, providers are likely serving multiple clients, and promising each of them a catered, custom environment. If an incident occurs on the provider's end -- an improperly maintained or overburdened server for example -- users may find themselves facing the same problems the public cloud presents: unreliability and lack of control.