Private Cloud As a Route to Revenue Growth
With customization capabilities, strong compliance controls and scalability that rivals public cloud, the private cloud deserves consideration as a driver of revenue.
Private cloud is rarely thought of in the context of revenue generation. Often, when public cloud and private cloud are examined through the same lens, public cloud is perceived as the easier path to revenue generation. And for many companies looking to move to the cloud quickly, that may be the case.
However, private cloud deserves consideration also, as it can be a powerful tool for driving revenue growth. While hyperscale public clouds have massively boosted the agility, flexibility and scalability of IT over the past decade, private cloud is an unsung hero with unique capabilities. A private cloud can offer customization opportunities and competitive advantages that lead to superior margins and sustainable expansion aligned with business forecasts — all routes to revenue growth.
Revenue comes from expanding the customer base and closing deals. The typical IT department actively supports all of the technologies that underpin vital business operations, from lead acquisition to price quoting, order taking, payment processing, materials purchasing and paying vendors[CB1] . Modern systems make the company reliant on IT throughout the entire workflow. And to outperform the competition in these areas, IT needs to be on the ball — agile and responsive.
Cloud solutions in general — public and private — can increase an organization’s agility, accelerate time to market for new products and services, improve customer experience through enhanced uptime, and enable developer experimentation in a secure environment.
But one of the reasons that businesses are looking closely at private cloud is as a source of differentiation. Private clouds offer a great opportunity for customization and differentiation, creating a competitive advantage that leads to revenue growth and improved margins. For example, a manufacturing application that is instrumental in creating a differentiated product for the business may require special hardware and software that cannot be easily assembled in a public cloud. Similarly, a production process may require sensor data to be processed locally to avoid latency issues; an edge application such as this is readily accommodated within a private cloud.
And when it comes to geographic market expansion requiring data sovereignty and residency, a private cloud can be a simpler option. Private cloud offers a business direct, hands-on control of the cloud infrastructure which can be an important factor when it comes to compliance. The potential for enhanced privacy and control that a private cloud offers will be a key requirement as businesses seek to adopt Generative AI sustainably and responsibly. A business's private proprietary data is its greatest source of differentiation, and few will want to run the risk of it leaking out by becoming part of the training data of a publicly available generative AI foundation model.
A private cloud also offers a route to sustainable business growth by aligning closely with typical business forecasting principles. For example, publicly traded companies are expected to forecast the expected results for the forthcoming quarter — a time frame well suited to scaling a private cloud. When the key to profitable growth is to keep variable costs in line with business expansion, aligning IT scaling with the bookings and revenue forecasts makes a lot of sense. In fact, partly for this reason, some businesses have repatriated data to private infrastructure. And modern private clouds can offer near-instant scalability that some industries, such as retail, need from time-to-time, just like a public cloud.
The point is that when it comes to adopting cloud technology to support business growth, a private cloud can offer solutions just as well as public cloud. Each organization should consider the relative merits of each cloud to support its unique growth strategy. In many cases, the way forward will be a combination of both, but if risk factors such as span of control, trust and transaction costs and business criticality are high, then a private cloud will make a lot of sense. Another way of looking at it is to consider whether a workload is key to a business’s competitive advantage. If it is, and the business has the capabilities to support it, then a private cloud is probably the sensible option.
Factors like control, compliance mandates, data sovereignty requirements or AI adoption will often make private cloud the preferred option for some business-critical workloads tied to revenue generation. And a modern private cloud can match a public cloud for scalability and instant flexibility when needed.
So, if you look at cloud platforms in the context of revenue generation, private cloud deserves just as much attention as public cloud. Often, the best solution will incorporate both, but for workloads that are key to competitive advantage and growth, private cloud might be the revenue generator of choice.
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About the Authors
Global Campaign Manager
Nic Du Feu
Nic is a marketer with over 30 years of experience in telecoms and IT based in the UK. Having spent the first 5 years of his career in engineering he then moved through a variety of GTM roles including product management, marketing, business development and consulting which involved traveling throughout EMEA and included a period in North America. During this time, Nic has crossed paths with a myriad of technologies ranging from the physics of optics and wireless through switching and routing to rating and charging applications, all with a focus on understanding the customer challenges that they can solve. Outside of work, Nic and his wife love to spend time with their children’s growing families and maximizing the riot of plants and colors in their garden throughout the year.
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