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 organizations like a public cloud, a private cloud is dedicated to a single organization. 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 organization (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 virtualization.
In truth, virtualization 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 organization. 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 virtualization on-premises and remotely. The only difference is whether the resources are dedicated to one organization or shared with other customers.
