Bell Business Insights newsletter

By David Shin, Associate Director, Product Management

By now, most organizations understand the benefits of cloud computing and have evaluated to some degree how it might work for them. But cloud computing suffers from the perception that IT has little control over how cloud infrastructure and applications are used, and sensitive corporate data could reside on or traverse networks where it is exposed to foreign laws.

One alternative has a lot of people talking: private cloud. This solution combines the scalability and flexibility of public cloud computing with the enterprise-grade security and administration of an in-house resource behind the corporate firewall. Internal network and datacenter administrators effectively become service providers that meet the computing resource needs of "customers" within the organization.

From virtualization to automatic provisioning

So how would private cloud computing affect your organization? In many ways, a private cloud is the next logical step after virtualization. Virtualization separates operating systems and applications from underlying hardware. In this way, it maximizes utilization of available computing resources across multiple virtual machines. Virtualization saves money, gives administrators more control over computing resources and also makes provisioning more dynamic – but it doesn't make it automatic. An administrator still needs to provision hardware, review resource capacity and allocate a virtual machine through a request-based process.

With private cloud, the infrastructure you build can actually respond to user requests for computing resources. Private cloud solves the problem of manual system administrative intervention with increased automation. Networking and storage infrastructure shares its intelligence with management-level applications such as virtualization management platforms, creating the "knowledge" and visibility necessary to apply policies to a workload, a virtual machine or throughout an entire infrastructure. Computing resources can then be made available to an organization's users by means of a self-service process.

This level of automation goes far beyond virtualization, replacing many of the actions of an IT administrator and reducing delay. By means of a user-friendly dashboard, individual users can select from a catalogue of resources, track usage, monitor capacity, change the way that resources are provisioned, and pull historical reports on bandwidth and storage usage.

At the same time, however, IT remains in control: administrators set parameters for departments, teams or individuals including usage limits, bandwidth thresholds, and can allow computing resources to dynamically expand or diminish. Private cloud solutions can drastically reduce IT's administrative burden by providing reporting detail for budgeting and billing purposes, and concomitant accountability for resource usage.

A whole new style of IT

Private clouds require significant investment, not only in terms of capital requirements – most organizations increase computing capacity to ensure they can meet fluctuating demand – but also in change management. A private cloud model requires a shift in behaviour on the part of IT and their internal customers. Self-service and usage metering by department introduces accountability for resource use, changing the culture of how IT is delivered and charged.

New management and policy-based controls also have to be put in place to limit access to resources based on cost models and usage. Many internal processes must be thought through before implementation. On the whole, implementing private cloud is at least as demanding a process as making the initial shift to a virtualized environment.

A stepping stone

As big a change as it may be, many consider moving to a private cloud an interim step towards the public cloud. Once the shift to private cloud is complete, it is easier to transition the entire infrastructure to a cloud service provider if and when the time comes.

In the meantime, it's also simpler for an organization to begin leveraging the public cloud offerings of external vendors for specific scenarios, such as "bursting" to cope with spikes in demand, or "test/dev" solutions that offer tailored, controlled environments for software development. In these hybrid models, private clouds automatically and securely draw upon public cloud resources, eliminating the need to overprovision internally.

Putting IT back in control

As demands continue to grow for computing resources, organizations face challenging IT decisions. Virtualization has helped many optimize what resources they have, but users still expect quick access to the resources they need. If they don't get this internally, they may work around IT and use external resources that do not meet corporate standards for security and compliance.

Private clouds allow organizations to provision computing resources with all the benefits of cloud computing without relinquishing control, while also helping to establish a new operating model for the future.

Talk to Bell

If you would like to learn more about private cloud solutions in the context of your organization or how private cloud can work in conjunction with other cloud computing services, contact your Bell representative today or click here to have someone contact you.

About the author

David Shin is Associate Director, Product Management at Bell. David has gained extensive experience in developing and implementing hosting and data centre solutions at Bell.

Want to learn more about how the cloud can help your business?

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Demystifying the cloud: A practical roadmap to deploying cloud computing (White paper)

Are you ready for the cloud? An assessment tool