What Is Private Cloud?

What Is a Private Cloud?

A private cloud delivers many of the same benefits of a public cloud—speed, scalability, and cost savings. But instead of serving multiple organisations like a public cloud, a private cloud is dedicated to a single organisation. Thus, it satisfies the essential concern of IT leaders for security while keeping data centers agile and cost-efficient.

To be classified as a private cloud by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the cloud infrastructure must be provisioned exclusively for use by a single organisation (which may consist of multiple consumers).

Private Cloud vs. Public Cloud

When people talk about private clouds, they’re usually referring to the practice of virtualizing your on-premises infrastructure through virtual machines (VM) and containers to create your own private cloud. This tendency has led to a common misconception that private cloud refers to on-premises infrastructure given cloud-like agility and economics through virtualisation. 

In truth, virtualisation is what makes all cloud infrastructure possible. The private/public divide is defined by privacy—technology, location, ownership, and management responsibility have nothing to do with it. A cloud hosted on a remote server and owned and operated by a third party is still a private cloud if its resources are dedicated to a single organisation. Many cloud providers sell off-premises private clouds—dedicated servers that don’t share resources with other customers.

Both private and public clouds offer improved agility, scalability, and efficiency. Both can use virtualisation on-premises and remotely. The only difference is whether the resources are dedicated to one organisation or shared with other customers.

The Benefits of Private Clouds

A private cloud offers:

• All the flexibility, scalability, and efficiency benefits of cloud computing
• Higher availability and reliability of dedicated resources
• Improved security and regulatory compliance

Why Choose Pure Storage for Your Private Cloud?

From VMware to Microsoft System Centre to OpenStack, Pure Storage® all-flash storage has the VM cloud integrations you need to build your own on-premises private cloud. Advantages of working with Pure include:

• The high-speed, high-throughput, massively parallel performance of NVMe storage
• On-demand container storage as a service with Pure Service Orchestrator™
• Cloud-compatible on-demand data services with Purity and Pure1®
• All-flash platform as a service (PaaS) with Red Hat OpenShift integration
• FlashStack™—a turnkey private cloud solution developed by Cisco and Pure Storage

The best part of building your private cloud with Pure products is the ease with which you can evolve your private cloud into a hybrid cloud. Pure makes it extremely easy to move data and compute resources between your private and public clouds.