While public clouds offer Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) lower overhead, they introduce risks including poor performance, lost data, and breached security.

IT’s responsibility to protect corporate data and support end-user productivity is driving the creation of private clouds — hosted services delivered from inside the corporate firewall.  

Private clouds offer important advantages:

  • SMBs can focus on offering the type of cloud services, performance, and security levels that address business strategy and growth
  • Scalability up and down as performance needs dictate
  • IT managers can add or reduce bandwidth easily

Traditional data center infrastructures house shared databases and deliver services from dedicated servers. Application installation and data processing is left to end-user hard drives. With private clouds IT can consolidate traditional servers by implementing virtual servers.  

Virtualization enables IT to:

  • Quickly roll out new applications
  • Use the data center to make changes rather than end-user devices
  • Know which user groups are consuming various applications or services
  • Use that data for strategic planning
  • Create high-performance, high availability infrastructures

Creating a private cloud model

Any major infrastructure shift benefits from planning and alignment with business strategy.

Companies must know:

  • Who will use the cloud
  • What services and applications will be delivered
  • How to evolve the current data center for a private cloud

For the first full implementation, it is wise to choose a user community that can quickly benefit from a private cloud. This is a great way to experiment and learn.

Key questions to ask before implementing a private cloud:

  1. What are the core business goals and how can private cloud implementation help realize those goals?
  2. How will private cloud capabilities change end-user behavior and expectations?
  3. Will current IT resources support private cloud implementation?
  4. What IT investments are needed to fully implement a private cloud?

 

Choosing a private cloud platform.

To access all the advantages of a private cloud SMBs must take care in selecting a platform. The platform should recognize that standardization quickly earns positive return on investment and allow IT to configure a catalog of applications that users can choose from.  

Since change is much easier to effect in a private cloud environment, management capabilities should help track changes. The more the private cloud platform automates, the more agile the datacenter becomes and the more the investment will pay off.

Learn if a private cloud is right for you.

A Private Cloud Model: How to Move from a Traditional Data Center Infrastructure
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