Private Cloud Considerations

The private cloud market is getting hot as plenty of advantages to enterprises in industries with higher-level security and compliance requirements are being offered. While the attractions are obvious, it must be noted that private cloud implementations can significantly differ from those of public clouds. If you are ready for the jump to private clouds, virtual private clouds (VPCs) or managed public clouds, you should make sure you understand the following:

Workload and performance

• What are your performance and workload requirements? Can your applications run on virtual servers that are physically shared among multiple applications?
• If the service is a VPC, does the vendor provide a higher-level SLA guarantee than a comparable public cloud implementation?
• What kind of monitoring tools are available to help you effectively allocate resources?
• How important is scalability to your applications? Private clouds have a lot less room to scale than public clouds and, thus, you should be prepared to lose some of the flexibility in the tradeoff.

Security and compliance

• What are your regulatory compliance needs related to data storage and management?
• Have you created a plan for regulatory compliance management?
• What parts of your data and applications are considered highly critical? How are they going to be protected?
• Do you have backup and a disaster recovery plan in place?

Costs

• Have you understood all the costs charged by the vendor? How expensive is it compared to a public cloud of similar computing/storage capacity?
• Are you ready for a higher initial financial outlay for the private cloud setup? Private clouds have higher initial costs, though effective implementations can help cut IT costs over a period of time.

Setup and maintenance

• How complex is the private cloud setup? Does the vendor offer support during setup?
• How complex is the migration?
• How easy are the tools for managing the private cloud? Does your team have the skill sets to master the tools easily?
• How easy is it for your internal users to get started with the cloud? Can they request new services to be added to the mix?
• What virtualization mix makes sense for you? Virtualization technologies come in a variety of flavors, with different approaches to availability, scalability and performance optimization.

By Balaji Viswanathan

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