Private clouds - The challenges en route

By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 21 December 2010, 15:15 IST
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Private clouds - The challenges en route
Bangalore: Public clouds grabbed most of the attention when the concept of cloud computing was first introduced. But it soon shifted to private clouds when IT managers analyzed the security risks of having data outside the corporate firewall. Analysts and various surveys suggest that private clouds will get more enterprise investment in the next few years reports Bill Claybrook for Computer World. But there are various challenges en route switching to private clouds like management issues and operational processes that have to be figure out. Time, money and effort are needed for an on-premises private cloud to be built internally by IT. It is not an easy task to transform from traditional data center though with some servers virtualized to private cloud architecture since the entire data center won't be cloud-enabled as of the moment. No single vendor provides all of the software required to build and manage a real private cloud today apart from what is much hyped about. Vendors are more interested in doing their own definitions of private cloud to fit their product sets rather than one with server virtualization, storage virtualization, network virtualization, and resource automation and orchestration. Though many IT professionals equate a private cloud with virtualization, they are not the same. To be considered a cloud, the architecture must be set up to provide resource orchestration and automation on top of the virtualization layer. The aim of a private cloud is to allow IT managers to reduce costs and provide so-called agile provisioning instead of enabling management of the infrastructure more expedient. A private cloud with virtualization underpinnings turns the technology infrastructure into a pool of resources that can be provisioned on demand with minimal manual labor.

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