Cloud Computing For Dummies®

Chapter 9. Discovering Private and Hybrid Clouds

In This Chapter

• Defining a private cloud

• Choosing between public, private, and hybrid cloud environments

• Investigating private cloud economics

• Looking at vendor solutions for private and hybrid

While many business executives are attracted to the idea of the public cloud, just as many are interested in achieving the benefits of the cloud but on an internal basis. There are different reasons why companies investigating a cloud might want a private cloud instead of using a public one. The most obvious reason is privacy and security of data. Another reason that some companies are considering the private cloud is that they have already invested in a lot of hardware, software, and space and would like to be able to leverage their investments, but in a more efficient manner.

What if you could avoid the security issue by keeping your data inside your firewall and still gain public cloud benefits? Then consider a private or a hybrid cloud. Many companies are looking at a situation where they actually see the benefits of using a public cloud for some services, a private cloud for others, a hybrid cloud for some situations, and their traditional data center for the rest. Indeed, the world of IT is complicated. We suspect that most organizations will have a combination of approaches — a hybrid of public and private clouds with traditional data centers included.

In this chapter, we explain what a private cloud is and how it can work in tandem with public ...