What is private cloud?

In an era where everybody speaks IT, you may already know enough about clouds! But let me tell you, there is always room to learn more. Cloud service providers offer three different types of cloud service: public cloud, hybrid cloud or private cloud. This article will focus on the Private Cloud.

What is private cloud?

Let’s say you run a small business. You start out with two computers and pay for an Internet connection, including a Wi-Fi router for your office. You also buy a printer.

Because you have an employee, you start sharing a folder on your desktop at the office, so he can access your business documents, such as quote templates, product or service presentations. He also adds his own files. You have different Excel spreadsheets that help you with accounting and customer management.

A year goes by and business is good. However, you’re starting to have problems managing and organizing your data, so you ask for help from a young IT geek you know. He builds a small database using Microsoft Access on your PC that includes forms to help you enter, query or delete data, plus printable reports. The database can only be accessed locally on that specific computer.

Your business takes off. You move your office to another location. You hire more personnel and buy a new desktop for each new user. The desktop that hosts the Access database becomes so critical you have to keep it running non-stop during office hours. Also, it becomes difficult to ensure data security with people bringing in files they downloaded from the Internet and exchanging and taking home business data using USB drives. You’re starting to find viruses on your computers. You talk to a friend about your struggle and she introduces you to a Managed Service Provider (MSP). You decide to hire him.

One of the first things your new MSP tells you is you have to better manage your computers and host your critical database on a dedicated server. He suggests you connect all PCs to a local network. To run the database and other applications, he recommends you acquire one or more dedicated servers from a cloud provider.

You select a cloud provider and provision a dedicated cloud server for your organization. Your next step is to get your own private cloud servers. But, what is the private cloud?

Simply put, it’s a type of cloud computing that is dedicated to a single organization. This is different from public clouds, which deliver services to several organizations at once. The private cloud offers companies the same ability to scale up and down as the public cloud, but it has its own dedicated architecture. The virtual machines you set in the provider’s datacenter are accessed remotely using a “terminal” client. The access to the cloud server is secured through a secure VPN link from your offices to the provider’s datacenter.

The advantages of private cloud

Here are some of the characteristics of the private cloud.

• Scalability: You can expand or reduce your servers to fit your workload.
• Redundancy: Infrastructure is built in such a way that there’s no single point of failure; you can be confident that your Private Cloud servers will keep running, no matter what happens.
• Self-service: Private cloud offerings (Performance Cloud, for example) typically give you ass to a control panel to create, scale and delete servers.
• Server virtualization: Private cloud servers are virtual machines, which is why it’s easy to scale them up or down.

As technology continues to change, it’s time to think about a better solution for your company. To ensure that your business survives, you’ll have to start thinking about things like compliance, data security and how you can work in other regions or countries. Hiring people in different parts of the world and making them all work together comes with its share of constraints. In these instances, you might want to think about leveraging public cloud services as well.
 

Considering public cloud services

With public cloud services, your servers, emails, collaborative tools, websites and other applications can all be run out of your offices. You’ll have better availability, a more flexible budget and improved security. Your employees can securely access public cloud services from anywhere in the world, at any time; sometimes by using a simple tablet. However, moving to the public cloud is a gradual process. The right cloud partner can help! Explore Sherweb’s Partner Guide for more information about how we can help your business grow with value-added cloud solutions and services.