This year, more enterprises will discover that their private clouds have disappeared.
That’s because the definition of what constitutes a real private cloud is narrowing. Until now, some enterprises have been content to call their virtual data centers a cloud platform, equating a virtualized infrastructure with a cloud infrastructure. The two, however, are very different. A virtual data center may deliver some of the characteristics of a cloud—high performance, scalability, security, better cost efficiencies—but it doesn’t meet the full criteria of a private cloud, especially when it comes to delivering automation and self-service capabilities.
So what does a real private cloud look like?
- It should be simple to use. Internal departments (i.e., your customers) must be able to request, manage and monitor IT resources just as they would in a public cloud. In fact, in every aspect, your private cloud should be as user-friendly as its public cloud counterparts, or you’ll end up losing your customers as a result.
- It should meet all corporate policy/compliance requirements. The main attraction of a private cloud is often security, and your customers reasonably expect that the private cloud will support enterprise security requirements as a matter of course.
- It should provide full automation. Speed of deployment is key to the cloud’s appeal, and automation allows IT and its internal customers to quickly deploy applications in the cloud by simplifying provisioning and other processes.
- It should offer enforceable SLAs. Public cloud providers stand by their solutions with service level agreements (SLAs), and your customers expect the same from a private cloud. This often requires IT departments to re-examine their storage, server, and networking systems to make sure they each deliver high performance across a multitude of applications.
- It should allow applications to move easily between test, production and public cloud environments. Many internal customers use the cloud as a testing grounds because resources can be easily ramped up or down as needed. Private clouds should provide a testing/development environment that matches the production environment and supports the movement of applications from test to production seamlessly, or allows them to tap into the public cloud if a hybrid model is desired.
As the cloud market matures, we expect more enterprises to look for all-in-one cloud solutions from established vendors. Using a pre-integrated, pre-validated private cloud solution not only accelerates deployment but also reduces risk. VMware’s vCloud Suite is a good example of this. It provides the hypervisor, automation, and self-servicing capabilities that a private cloud requires, all in a single solution.
Add VCE’s converged infrastructure, VMware NSX for network virtualization, and EMC’s XtremIO Flash-based storage system, and you have a complete private cloud that is already tested and ready to go.
Along with minimizing integration complexity, enterprises are also looking to minimize the management complexity of the cloud. This is where Rolta AdvizeX comes into play, because we provide both the critical early-stage consulting to create a successful private cloud strategy as well as the implementation and, if desired, ongoing management of the private cloud to ensure SLAs are met.
Whether you like the idea or not, your private cloud is up against some pretty impressive public cloud competition. You can concede the cloud, and risk losing relevance, or use the same tools as the leading competition to build a better solution. If you’re ready to get your cloud game on, call Rolta AdvizeX and we’ll help you beat the competition. ▪