What is a Private Cloud?
A private cloud is a dedicated environment that delivers similar advantages to public cloud — including scalability, improved resource utilization and self-service capabilities — while retaining the isolation of single-tenant servers. A private cloud is located at a data center operated by either an organization or a hosting service provider. Relative to other solutions, private clouds provides strong control and security over its apps, data and systems while offering cloud-like agility.
Private clouds are one of the three types of cloud computing, which also includes public clouds and hybrid clouds. Public clouds are offered by service providers, such as Amazon Web Services®, Microsoft®Azure® and OpenStack®, and provide compute, storage and other resources via the Internet. Hybrid clouds combine a mix of private and public clouds.
Public clouds are the most popular type of cloud computing, with 89 percent of organizations using one in 2016, according to RightScale’s State of the Cloud survey. Private clouds are the second most popular type, with a 77 percent adoption rate, followed by hybrid with 71 percent.
According to RightScale, businesses typically use an average of three public clouds and three private clouds. This suggests that, increasingly, medium and large enterprises operate in a multi-cloud world. Private cloud adoption, for instance, rose significantly last year, from 63 percent to 77 percent.