The Private Cloud, also known as the "internal cloud" or "corporate cloud" is a term used to describe proprietary computing architecture that provides hosted services to a limited number of people behind a firewall. Many corporations and agencies will have an internal cloud and be connected to an "external" or public cloud separately.
A "public cloud" is one that is accessible by a wide range of participants and does not rest behind a traditonal fire wall.
Advances in virtualization and distributed computing have allowed corporate network and datacenter administrators to effectively become service providers that meet the needs of their "customers" within the corporation.
The main use of private clouds, according to a study of users of both private and hybrid clouds, is to create a more flexible, scalable infrastructure for internal IT operations (76%), followed by the ability to connect more easily and in more significant ways with external partners, suppliers, and customers (51%). Forty-seven percent seek to create advantage for their own organization in an industry ecosystem they control. The CIO of a global construction company believes that the only real difference between private and public clouds is physical location and whose balance sheet the asset sits on. �As long as you�re building on the same principles and technology, it doesn�t matter if it�s private or public,� he said. �It comes down to comfort levels and policies that certain information has to sit on assets owned by us.�
This sentiment is atypical, however, attributable to the fact that this CIO is a sophisticated early adopter.
Most executives are still quite concerned about the perceived barriers and risks of cloud, with
data security (60%), business continuity (46%), and legal liability and compliance issues (33%) topping
the list.
Cloud users are waiting for legal precedent to be set through test cases; in the meantime, some companies are taking out cyber-liability policies to offset costs in the event of data loss due to a failure or security breach, as few providers offer any such guarantees.
Executives interviewed for this study said that bandwidth constraints in some parts of the world already limit what�s possible, making it harder to realize the vision of the �fully distributed intelligent enterprise.�
Marketing media that uses the words "private cloud" is designed to appeal to an organization that needs or wants more control over their data than they can get by using a third-party hosted service such as Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or Simple Storage Service (S3).
Source: Harvard Business Review Analytic Services
