What is private cloud?
A private cloud computing model is when all cloud resources are dedicated to a single user or tenant, granting them unique access, and is also known as a corporate or internal cloud. It delivers some – though not all – of the benefits of a typical public cloud set-up, namely shared access to scalable computing resources, workload elasticity, and the automation of key tasks.
The main private cloud advantage is that it serves the specific needs of an organisation and provides more control over resources as access to a private cloud environment is restricted to certain users only. It also helps in meeting privacy or compliance requirements. This is especially pertinent for any company that has sensitive data – for example, personally identifiable information, such as customer accounts in the financial sector and patient records in healthcare organisations.
What does private cloud mean?
So, what is private cloud? It is defined as being a single-tenant environment, meaning the computing resources are specific to each tenant, or user. In other words, specific to the organisation or entity using it – as opposed to the public cloud where resources are shared by multiple users. These dedicated resources can be managed and hosted via several different models.
It can be a hosted private cloud delivered by a third party in an off-site datacentre, on a client’s own premises, using some of their own IT resources, or deployed on a cloud provider's infrastructure. Private clouds typically employ virtualisation technology to pool physical hardware resources into a shared pool with isolated user access.
Why use a private cloud?
A private cloud is often chosen because it offers the same levels of security and control as an on-premises IT set-up but also offers the peace of mind that access is completely limited to authorised users only. This can appeal to businesses with sensitive data such as in banking and finance, government, healthcare, and any business that needs to comply with data privacy or regulatory requirements.
Private clouds are usually deployed within a firewall, increasing network efficiency and delivering superior performance. A private cloud infrastructure also offers more predictable performance for workloads as opposed to the public cloud, since it doesn’t share bandwidth or use the same hardware. The metered, uncertain monthly usage and storage costs of the public cloud do not come into play in this scenario. Instead, monthly costs usually remain the same regardless of how many workloads are in operation, or how much data is transferred.
Finally, a private cloud allows for higher levels of customisation and can deliver better long-term savings over unpredictable monthly billing costs. Organisations can mitigate capital expenditure in hardware by using a hosted private cloud service, where equipment use mirrors that of a leasing model using the latest technologies.
Advantages of private cloud
Control
Since private clouds are usually located in privately hosted environments, users are afforded more control over their data, applications and overall infrastructure, and benefit from on-demand resources. This gives businesses the ability to handle large workloads and flexibly add more compute power when needed. It also enables better resource utilisation, thanks to virtualisation. This means workloads can be shifted to underused servers to maximise resource use.
Customisation
Since a private cloud is designed for a specific organisation, using its own dedicated hardware, it allows for a high level of customisation without the restrictions of the public cloud. This applies to how the infrastructure is set up and configured, how resources are managed, and how storage and networking features are defined. Private cloud hosting can also allow businesses to choose from a hosted private cloud datacentre to dedicated hardware bare-metal servers, with infinitely scalable resources.
Cost
Private cloud computing can help to lower total cost of ownership versus a public cloud setup, which bases costs dependent on cloud service's usage. This means as workloads and overall consumption grows, so do costs. According to a , 41 percent of users reported overall cloud cost savings with a private cloud compared to a public one. The report suggested that more effective management was the reason behind this thanks to items such as capacity planning tools and key automations that help to reduce private cloud costs.
Security
A private cloud infrastructure allows for much more control over security since servers and databases are not shared with other users. This approach enables organisations to set their own security protocols and have better safeguards against breaches. Private cloud hosting is often an important part of a disaster recovery plan. A hosting company offers support for failover via geographically dispersed datacentres. Guaranteed uptime and high availability as well as security expertise are additional benefits.
Compliance
In an era of data privacy laws such as the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and with sensitive healthcare and financial data that cannot travel borders, compliance is king. A private cloud infrastructure gives organisations much more control over sensitive data and supports data privacy by keeping data within a company’s own or rented private infrastructure. It means that data retention and access control is much simpler too.
Private cloud vs public cloud
The public cloud is delivered by a third-party cloud provider in a multi-tenant environment rather than a single-tenant one as multiple users share the same resources. All the infrastructure and compute resources of the public cloud are managed and maintained by the provider and distributed between hundreds and sometimes thousands of other users. This means that users do not have the inherent control and security of the private cloud.
The public cloud operates on a pay-as-you-go model of consumption to gain access to its resources, which can be an advantage for smaller businesses who need access to extensive compute resources. A hosted private cloud can offer more speed and flexibility than an on-premises private cloud, offering services such as virtualisation and containerisation as well as security knowledge and capabilities that might otherwise have to be managed by the user.
Private cloud vs hybrid cloud
The hybrid cloud is a combination of a private cloud and public cloud and gives the user the best of both worlds with high levels of flexibility. This model requires an organisation to use tools to manage or orchestrate the interconnections and communication between workloads in both computing environments. This is essential in meeting a business’s necessary performance goals, and keeping costs under control, such as by moving workloads between both clouds as internal organisational needs develop and grow.
This approach is useful when sensitive data needs to be isolated for privacy and compliance reasons, and when organisations have dynamic workload requirements. Integrating the two environments is ideal since resources can be re-allocated to either environment when computing needs or application and performance objectives change. Big data processing is another area that’s suited to the hybrid cloud. For example, using the public cloud, businesses can increase compute and cloud storage requirements on-demand to process anonymised data and use the private cloud resources to ensure critical data elements remain protected.
At OVHcloud, we give customers complete control over where their data is hosted and enable them to have full cost control. We offer the ability to scale resources across on-premises set-ups, in isolated spaces in our datacentres and dedicated connections to public clouds.
Types of Private Cloud
Hosted private cloud
A managed private cloud is a form of private cloud hosting; it’s when the cloud infrastructure is hosted exclusively by the cloud private server rather than on-premises. Typically, this means that the provider is responsible for infrastructure maintenance and management and can provide flexible on-demand compute and storage resources. This represents a great option to create a private virtualised environment in the cloud with higher availability for mission critical applications.
OVHcloud delivers a VMware virtualised cloud platform to deliver resources as you need. You have all the control required to protect and process critical and sensitive data on your own dedicated private infrastructure with 99.9 percent availability.
Virtual private cloud
A virtual private cloud is when the cloud resources sit within a multi-tenant public cloud infrastructure. It uses virtualisation to mimic a private cloud set-up by separating workloads in virtual, walled-off compartments on the same hardware resources shared by other users. Even though technically, this is a shared environment, this separation is private and offers a similar high-security environment as that of a private cloud. It also delivers the same on-demand and scalable resource capabilities of the public cloud.
Cloud services
In private, public, and hybrid cloud environments, users can choose combinations of services. These include Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), which provides maintenance-free software over the internet; Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that provides both hardware and software resources; and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), that provisions server, storage, and networking services.
Private cloud storage
Private cloud storage is a service that uses a cloud computing model to deliver flexible and scalable virtualised storage resources across an organisation. Specifically, the storage service is dedicated to a single organisation and authorised external partners. It can be deployed on-premises or on equipment within the datacentre of a third-party provider.
We offer several adapted cloud storage solutions at OVHcloud including block, object, or file storage. We can help you manage any of the constraints concerning how your data is used and processed. Our experts are available to assist you in storing and protecting your valuable data.
OVHcloud and private cloud
At OVHcloud, we provide a great number of private cloud services and are one of Europe’s leading cloud service providers. We can deliver your new hosted infrastructure within an hour and get you started on your digital transformation journey with our Hosted Private Cloud solutions. We deliver virtualised and containerised solutions that enable you to benefit from on-demand resources, such as extra compute capacity to help you manage peak workloads.
Our private cloud infrastructures can support the strictest of security needs – we use the SecNumCloud framework, the highest level of security for sensitive and critical data, to give you – our customers – the peace of mind that you need.
We can connect your private cloud to multi-cloud environments from your on-premises datacentre as well as to other public cloud providers. We offer secure links from our Hosted Private Cloud to the OVHcloud Public Cloud and to our dedicated Bare Metal servers – giving you the best of all possible worlds.