The Making of a Modern Private Cloud

When private cloud first came on the scene, it was transformative — opening the way to innovation across industries. But as hyperscale public clouds came into the picture, the future of private cloud becomes unclear. Would private cloud fade away as public cloud claimed dominance in the cloud world?

Behind the scenes, private cloud has steadily continued to evolve with the times, adopting features that used to be considered solely in the purview of public cloud.

As a result, private cloud continues to be alive and well in modern IT. It enables businesses to tap into cloud innovations — including AI, machine learning, containers and serverless — within the predictability and familiarity of their own private cloud.

In the latest Cloud Talk podcast episode, Rackspace Technology Chief Technology Evangelist Jeff DeVerter dives into these aspects as he speaks with three IT leaders — each with a unique perspective on the history of private cloud, how it’s evolved and where it’s going.

Chad Dunn, VP of Product Management for HCI at Dell Technologies, discusses how private cloud should no longer be viewed as a cost center, but as a competitive differentiator, central to business success.

“You are seeing a lot of the behaviors that you would have seen in public cloud happening in the private cloud. Customers want that same kind of experience, whether it's a self-service portal to deploy applications or consumption models. They want that public cloud-like experience, and that's something that private cloud can bring to them.”

Geoff Thompson, Vice President of VMware Cloud Provider Sales, extolls the benefits of private cloud to better support IoT and 5G and explains why private cloud is here to stay.

“Private cloud is as prevalent now as it ever was. Customers want to put their hands on something and say ‘That's mine. I own it,’” says Thompson. “So in terms of standing up private clouds, modernizing the network to make sure that the connectivity is there back to the mothership and then across to other clouds, that's key. As private cloud capabilities evolve, and the connectivity between private and public gets faster and more consistent, the lines [between public and private clouds] are just gone.”

Eric Miller, Vice President of Private Cloud Solutions at Rackspace Technology, argues that while people might see the cloud as leaving the “old” ways behind, that’s not the case. “I think there's a stigma that you have to go to public cloud in order to innovate in order to use these tools, like infrastructures,” says Miller. “But the reality is that that's actually not true. Private cloud platforms have the ability to manage infrastructure as code and there are automation suites that offer all the same sorts of ‘genie-like’ power over your private cloud as well.”