The Private cloud

In a private cloud model, the control of a secure and unique cloud environment to manage your resources is done by your IT department. The difference with public cloud is that the pool of resources is accessible only by you and therefore it makes management much easier and secure.

So, if you require a dedicated resource, based on performance, control, security, compliance or any other business aspect, the private cloud solution might just be the right solution for you.

More and more organisations are looking for the flexibility and scalability of cloud solutions. But many of these organisations struggle with business and regulatory requirements that keep them from being the right candidate for public or private cloud offerings, they think.

It can be that you work within a highly regulated environment that is not suitable for public cloud, and you don't have the internal resources to set up or administer suitable private cloud infrastructure. On the other hand, it might just be that you have specific industry requirements for performance that aren't yet available in the public cloud.

In those cases it could just be that the private cloud as an alternative to the use of public cloud, is a great opportunity. A private cloud enables the IT department, as well as the applications itself, to access IT resources as they are required, while the datacentre itself is running in the background. All services and resources used in a private cloud are defined in systems that are only accessible to the user and are secured towards external access. The private cloud offers many of the advantages of the public cloud but at the same time it minimises the risks. Opposed to many public clouds, the criteria for performance and availability in a private cloud can be customised, and compliance to these criteria can be monitored to ensure that they are achieved.

As a cloud or enterprise architect a couple of things are very important in the cloud era. You should know your application (stack) and the  way it behaves. By knowing what your application needs, you can determine which parts of the application could be placed where, so private or public. A good way to make sure you know your application is using the DART principle:

Discover          -           Show me what is going on

Alert                -           Tell me when it breaks or is going bad

Remediate      -           Fix the problem

Troubleshoot   -           Find the root cause

If  you run the right tools within your environement, it should be easy to discover what is going on in your environment and where certain bottlenecks are, and how your application is behaving and what the requirements for it are, the step to hybrid is much easier to make, but that is for another post, first I'll dive into public cloud a little further next time.