Here Is Why Private Cloud Is Back
A few short years ago, many organizations rushed their applications to the public cloud because it was more advanced than what they could do themselves, offering a seeming nirvana of convenience, scale and cost savings. Fast forward to today: Private cloud is back.
Why private cloud is back
Technological advances have made private cloud comparable to public cloud for hosting new applications.
Private cloud is back because technology has advanced such that organizations now have the ability to support features within their private cloud that rival what a public cloud provider can offer. Reference architectures are available that enable private cloud benefits that were previously inconceivable. In fact, the trend today is that organizations are building new private clouds to host new applications.
Many organizations are repatriating applications for cost and compliance reasons.
To be fair, repatriation of applications from the public cloud back to the private cloud from where they originated is occurring, mainly for reasons including cost and compliance. In some cases, organizations did not realize the significant savings they originally expected or were promised from the move to public cloud. In others, compliance requirements changed over time in a way that favored hosting applications on their own infrastructure.
It helps organizations achieve long-term business resiliency and avoid competition issues.
Public cloud providers are independent entities who can choose to cut off service without warning at their own discretion. Looking at the recent news, several examples can be found of major cloud providers publicly discontinuing service to companies based on their stated beliefs and social activity. From the other side of the coin, for years Walmart has pushed businesses who wish to partner with them to not use the services of one of the major cloud providers.
In addition, public cloud providers are not unbiased ambassadors. Placing organizational IP into another company's servers will always come with some risk. When the provider is also a competitor, things can get complicated. Antitrust suits have been filed against providers as eerily similar products or services appear with questionable timing.
To ensure their own long-term resiliency, organizations have to take a more active role.
It prevents vendor lock-in.
Many organizations feel they will lose their ability to negotiate costs if they go all in on public cloud. They also want to avoid feeling stuck. Again, looking at the news, several recent examples of cloud providers charging exorbitant fees to migrate off of their platforms have been in the headlines.
It helps organizations move closer to the "perfect world" of continuous application placement analysis and movement.
The idea of continuously moving applications to where they can bring the most value at the lowest cost may be technically unachievable today but is nonetheless a worthy target.
Working towards this goal forces organizations to rethink how they are approaching their IT and take steps that will set them up for future success. For example, working toward this continuous optimization model requires changes and upgrades from the network level on up, and to allow this free movement, organizations will have to get comfortable with subnets existing in more than one data center at once. While this is the very definition of hybrid cloud, it does require sophisticated private clouds to be in the mix.
How to maximize its value
Understanding the above, this article shares some tips and suggestions that will help you make the most out of your private cloud and help ensure success.