When choosing your best cloud deployment model, you’ll need to take into account your unique business needs—including desired CapEx and OpEx, the types of workloads you’ll be running, and your available IT resources.
Many organizations will need some amount of private cloud services. A private cloud is commonly hosted in your data center and maintained by your IT team, with services delivered to your users via the internet. It can also be hosted off premises by a third-party provider as a managed private cloud.
Benefits of the private cloud
A private cloud gives you more control over how you use computing, storage, and networking. These always-on resources provide on-demand data availability, ensuring reliability and support for mission-critical workloads. You also get more control over security and privacy for data governance. This way, you can ensure compliance with any regulations, such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Furthermore, a private cloud allows you to support internally developed applications, protect intellectual property, and support legacy applications that were not built for the public cloud.
It’s also the best path for optimizing your computing costs. Over the long term, running certain workloads on a private cloud can deliver a lower TCO as you deliver more computing power with less physical hardware. However, setting up and maintaining a private cloud on premises requires a higher cost up front as you purchase IT infrastructure.
Because private clouds give you both scalability and elasticity, you can respond quickly to changing workload demands. Your IT team can set up a self-service portal and spin up a virtual machine in minutes. They can also enable a single-tenant environment in which software can be customized to meet your organization’s needs.
Private cloud use cases
There are certain scenarios in which private infrastructure is best for hosting cloud services. While these use cases are most common among government, defense, scientific, and engineering organizations, they can also occur in any business, depending on the specific needs. In short, a private cloud is ideal for any use case in which you must do the following:
- Protect sensitive information, including intellectual property
- Meet data sovereignty or compliance requirements
- Ensure high availability, as with mission-critical applications
- Support internally developed or legacy applications
In some cases, you may want to set up a virtual private cloud, an on-demand pool of computing resources that provides isolation for approved users. This gives you an extra layer of control for privacy and security purposes.
A private cloud gives you more control over your data and resources, support for proprietary or legacy applications, and a better TCO over the long term.
Intel®-based private cloud solutions
Intel® technologies power private clouds all over the world with highly tuned hardware, including Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors for high performance computing, Intel® Ethernet Network Adapters, Intel® Solid State Drives (Intel® SSDs), and Intel® Optane™ technology for premium memory. In addition, you can find Intel® Select Solutions from our partners for fast and easy deployment.
It’s worth noting that most organizations are best served by a hybrid, multicloud approach. Intel® architecture and vast ecosystem ensure you can use your preferred combination of public and private cloud and still get the best performance on Intel® technologies—from yesterday, today, and tomorrow—for agile, portable, and scalable solutions.
Private cloud developer resources
While setting up a private cloud requires IT expertise, there are a wide range of developer resources available to help. These include software for virtualization, orchestration, and containers from providers like Microsoft Azure* and VMware. This software has been optimized for Intel® architecture to help deliver the best performance. Intel is also a contributor to a variety of open source enterprise technologies, such as Kubernetes and OpenStack.
In addition, some of the top cloud service providers now offer their customers private cloud deployment options to help support a multicloud environment and better integration with public cloud services. These include Microsoft Azure Stack*, AWS Outposts*, Cisco Hybrid Cloud Platform for Google Cloud*, and Google Cloud’s Anthos*.
Finding the right balance of public and private cloud
Whether you place a workload with a public cloud service provider, host it on your own private cloud, or use a third-party provider for a managed private cloud depends on your specific needs for that application—such as cost, privacy, and technical requirements. Most organizations will need to take a multicloud approach to support their business goals. By building your cloud services based on your workload needs, you can optimize costs while satisfying your goals.