The why and how of private clouds

Last month I pointed out that cloud computing is influencing internal IT, including the redevelopment of traditional data centers around SOA and cloud computing concepts — or private clouds. Indeed, through 2012, Gartner forecasts IT organizations will spend more money on private cloud computing investments than on offerings from public cloud providers.

The top three reasons that enterprises are looking at private clouds are:

Security and privacy. Many Global 2000 companies are not ready to trust public cloud providers. They also worry about the providers giving up their data to the authorities or competitors, or just losing it all together.

Efficiency. Most nonvirtualized servers run at about 1 to 5 percent of capacity most of the time. The use of virtualization allows you to do much more with much less, and that’s the name of the game in IT today.

Control. While most CIOs will talk about the advantages of using public cloud computing, and perhaps point to their Salesforce.com subscription as proof that cloud computing is part of their portfolio, the thought of using servers that they can’t touch is still a bit disconcerting to many in IT.

So what are the issues you should consider when implementing a private cloud?

First, despite the fact that you’ll maintain this thing within your own data center, don’t neglect security. Security should be designed into the private cloud, and it needs to be implemented in a really systemic way, not simply as a layer of software.

Second, consider using a self-provisioning subsystem. The power of cloud computing is the ability to access computing capacity as needed (on demand), and the power of using a private cloud should be exactly the same. Users should be able to allocate storage, processing, or other resources without having to contact someone in IT. Also, make sure to build in a subsystem that tracks usage for system management and chargeback to departments.

Finally, continue to factor in the use of public cloud resources. Some open source private cloud offerings, such as Eucalyptus (now a part of Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud), are interface-compatible with public cloud offerings, including Amazon Web Services. This has the potential of allowing the use of public cloud resources, when needed, to support a burst in processing — in essence, using the private cloud as the first tier and the public cloud as the second tier. This brings you the best of both worlds, but it still requires thinking through security and governance.

This article, “The why and how of private clouds,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com.