We hear so much about the public cloud industry. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google and Oracle are in the news almost every day for a new service, data center or even a new partnership or acquisition. Of late, we’ve also been hearing a lot about a hybrid cloud strategy where some data and applications are in the public cloud while the rest, mostly mission-critical data, is stored in a company’s data center. But what about private cloud? Where does it stand?
Well, to start with, private cloud is an infrastructure that offers the same benefits as that of a public cloud service, but the underlying architecture is proprietary and is designed for the use of a single company only. For example, Walmart has its own private cloud architecture and doesn’t use any of the public cloud services offered by companies like AWS and Microsoft. IN fact, it’s even urging some of its vendors to stay away from public cloud thereby triggering a war of words between Walmart and AWS.
Private cloud is more prevalent than we think. In fact, a report by Yankee Group shows that twice the number of companies prefer a private cloud than a fully managed public cloud system.
Why?
Simply because private cloud offers the best of both worlds. You get the benefits of public cloud such as scalability, uptime and reduced maintenance and at the same time, your data is more than secure than a public cloud environment. Due to these increased benefits, many companies are moving to the private cloud sphere.
If you’re one such company looking to transition to private cloud, here are some things to keep in mind while building your own private cloud.
Start with a vision
Write down the goals of your private cloud strategy as that’ll always guide you towards the right implementation. Work with different teams, understand the existing problems for your developers and IT administrators and create a set of solutions to mitigate these problems.
Create a flexible private cloud
A common problem with many private cloud architectures is the lack of flexibility. Eventually, this is what causes the cloud to fail completely. So, have a clear idea for your architecture and more importantly, make sure it is flexible enough to accommodate unknown challenges and complex failures.
Automate your infrastructure
One of the pain points of private cloud is maintenance. To avoid this, try to automate many of your routine maintenance tasks. Also, have a plan to maintain your data center, network and procurement, as these are potential bottlenecks that can slow down your overall implementation.
Test, test and test
It’s absolutely important that you build out a stable private cloud. So, test your cloud multiple times and plug in all the loopholes that comes with it. If you overlook a known bug or fail to fix something due to lack of time, then there’s a possibility for your entire system to collapse.
Overall, building a private cloud is a journey by itself that comes with pitfalls. Steer away from these pits with our suggestions.
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