Over the past few months, I’ve been seeing more and more proponents voicing their push for a shift towards a private cloud. Since it’s been getting so much attention, my curiosity was sparked and I decided to look into the benefits and hindrances of this cloud-computing platform.
The Good
The main reason enterprises have been turning to private clouds is for the enhanced security. By creating your own cloud, data exchanges can be controlled, monitored and assumingly better protected behind the company’s firewall while still allowing you to leverage cloud-related benefits. Control is a big deal for IT, but it’s not synonymous with security.
The Bad
Private cloud deployments are expensive and the eventual ROI is still in question. Along with the necessary hardware, you also have to factor in the costs related to running and maintaining a complex private cloud. The upkeep costs are nearly impossible to predict, eliminating the ability to rationalize costs and spread out the front-loaded investment that is necessary during the setup and rollout phases. We’re not just talking money either. The time impact on your already-strained IT teams leads us to question: Is it worth it?
The Question Mark
A private cloud is based on an opposing philosophy that tears away the benefits that “computing cloud” is supposed to provide in the first place. Cloud computing is meant to dramatically decrease, if not completely remove, hardware and upkeep costs. Most companies do not have the internal infrastructure needed to support a private cloud, largely because the majority of the systems they run are done in the public cloud. In addition, the critical need for redundancy and back-up capabilities open up another monetary black hole needed to fund necessary costs to build the appropriate data warehouse and disaster recovery processes.
Why go backwards? Any critical IT project should include the evaluation of security parameters and be able to address the foreseeable issues that may arise by remaining on the public cloud. Do your due diligence and find a public cloud provider that has invested in the proper infrastructure to support enterprise-grade security parameters. In the end, there really is no question mark at all. There is only one cloud and it’s public. Embrace it and avoiding wasting more time and resources to discover what most of us already know.
Has your company thought about turning to a private cloud? What stopped them/encouraged them about it?
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