Private Cloud

We all have heard by now about Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service, and so on. The discussions around all of this is external clouds, external service providers and moving off premise. Should organizations look to have an internal cloud? What is the private cloud?

There are several drivers to this new phenomenon, and a couple are: costs, speed to implement and a pay as you go mentality. Companies almost always consider software as a service (SaaS) as a cost-advantage over on-premise in the short run due to its quick implementation times and pay-as-you-go pricing. But many companies are starting to question the long-term value of SaaS, wondering if the rent versus own model necessarily has a cost crossover point and if so, when? As SaaS continues to move into a broader range of applications and into larger, more strategic deployments, you should examine your long-term value with SaaS solutions.

Many publications, authors, and professionals seek to explain the private cloud is nothing more than the internal IT department competing with external service providers. In addition, there are others that explain the private cloud nothing more than virtualization. But is it really? Isn’t virtualization a component of a enterprise private cloud? To answer that we need to clearly define what a private cloud is.

Private cloud (also called internal cloud or corporate cloud) is a marketing term for a proprietary computing architecture that provides hosted services to enterprise users that sit behind a firewall.

Advances in virtualization and distributed computing have allowed corporate network and datacenter administrators to effectively become service providers that meet the needs of their "customers" within the corporation.

What Makes the Private Cloud Different?

• IT is built differently
      – e.g. pooled architectures, service orientation

• IT is consumed differently
     – variable consumption, expectations of infinite capacity

• IT is run differently
    – low-touch administration

• IT is governed differently
   – traditional methods of IT control will no longer work

• IT organization will evolve
   – roles, required skills and organizations need to support the new technologies, processes, governance and usage behaviors

Deploying Cloud Computing internally is really a technical, culture and delivery change. Rather than running Web-based and rich client applications over the Internet, a private cloud employs cloud computing within a company's own local or wide area networks. The term implies that the same virtualization and highly flexible and scalable methods used in huge Internet-based data centers are also used in the private clouds in the enterprise. Thus the thoughts around internally competing for the business IT needs.

To me, Private Cloud really encompasses the following key components:

    • Application Delivery Strategy

    • Virtualization Strategy

    • Self Service Strategy

    • Auto Provisioning Strategy

    • Asset Resource Strategy ( Server Pools, SVC Storage Controllers)

    • Dynamic Infrastructure Delivery Strategy

    • Management Dashboards, Reports

    • Performance and Capacity Management

    • Governance

The goal would be to allow the business go to a intranet page and request the IT Assets they need to support a given application, or business capability. This self service would kick off some provisioning, work flows (like approvals, notifications) and resource allocations. The challenge is to maintain a controlled environment, communications and allocation follow ups. I hear many times from CTO colleagues that assets remain allocated beyond the need or use, and the business never reports back the release of the asset. There needs to be a periodic review of the need, usage and performance.

I would also leverage the virtualization investment many companies have made with VMWare and utilize many of the tools they have to meet this objective. In addition, EMC has some great Private Cloud technologies and designs. Don’t try to re-invent the wheel here, but this is early adopter technology and there are some leaders out there doing the right things.

One more suggestion, don’t fight the business on Cloud Computing, it will only build walls between IT and the business. Take the initiative to start the discussions and offer to help them look for the solutions they desire and point out service provider security risks, disaster recovery challenges, and short falls in a constructive manner. Be the leader and put forth a team approach to the topic and see what the business capabilities the business seeks, and how IT can deliver all or part of a technology to support that capability requirement. Good Luck!