Ongoing hype around private cloud computing is creating misperceptions about private cloud, according to Gartner, Inc. To help reduce the hype and identify the real value of private cloud computing for IT leaders, Gartner explains five common misconceptions about private cloud.
"The growth of private cloud computing is being driven by the rapid penetration of virtualization and virtualization management, the growth of cloud computing offerings and pressure to deliver IT faster and cheaper," said Tom Bittman, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "However, in the rush to respond to these pressures, IT organizations need to be careful to avoid the hype, and, instead, should focus on a private cloud computing effort that makes the most business sense."
The five misconceptions about private cloud and the corresponding realities are:
1. Private Cloud Is Not Virtualization
Server and infrastructure virtualization are important foundations for private cloud computing. However, virtualization and virtualization management are not, by themselves, private cloud computing. Virtualization makes it easier to dynamically and granularly pool and reallocate infrastructure resources (servers, desktop, storage, networking, middleware, etc.). However, virtualization can be enabled in many ways, including virtual machines, operating systems (OSs) or middleware containers, robust OSs, storage abstraction software, grid computing software, and horizontal scaling and cluster tools.
Private cloud computing leverages some form of virtualization to create a cloud computing service. Private cloud computing is a form of cloud computing that is used by only one organization, or that ensures that an organization is completely isolated from others.
2. Private Cloud Is Not Just About Cost Reduction
An enterprise can reduce operational costs with a private cloud by eliminating common, rote tasks for standard offerings. A private cloud can reallocate resources more efficiently to meet enterprise requirements, possibly by reducing capital expenses for hardware.
However, private clouds require investment in automation software, and the savings alone might not justify the cost. As such, cost reduction is not the primary benefit of private cloud computing. The benefits of self-service, automation behind the self-service interface and metering tied to usage are primarily agility, speed to market, ability to scale to dynamic demand or to go after short windows of opportunity, and ability for a business unit to experiment.
3. Private Cloud Is Not Necessarily On-Premises
Private cloud computing is defined by privacy, not location, ownership or management responsibility. While the majority of private clouds will be on-premises (based on the evolution of existing virtualization investments), a growing percentage of private clouds will be outsourced and/or off-premises. Third-party private clouds will have a more flexible definition of "privacy." A third-party private cloud offering might share data center facilities with others, could share equipment over time (from a pool of available resources), and could share resources, but be isolated by a virtual private network (VPN) and everything in between.
4. Private Cloud Is Not Only Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Server virtualization is a major trend and, therefore, a major enabler for private cloud computing. However, private cloud is not limited in any way to IaaS. For example, with development and test offerings, enabling higher-level Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings for developers makes more sense than a simple virtual machine provisioning service.
Today, the fastest growing segment of cloud computing is IaaS. However, IaaS only provides the lowest-level data center resources in an easy-to-consume way, and doesn't fundamentally change how IT is done. Developers will use PaaS to create new applications designed to be cloud-aware, producing fundamentally new services that could be very differentiating, compared with old applications.
5. Private Cloud Is Not Always Going to Be Private
In many ways, Gartner analysts said that private cloud is a stopgap measure. Over time, public cloud services will mature, improving service levels, security and compliance management. New public cloud services targeting specific requirements will emerge. Some private clouds will be moved completely to the public cloud. However, the majority of private cloud services will evolve to enable hybrid cloud computing, expanding the effective capacity of a private cloud to leverage public cloud services and third-party resources.
"By starting with a private cloud, IT is positioning itself as the broker of all services for the enterprise, whether they are private, public, hybrid or traditional," Mr. Bittman said. "A private cloud that evolves to hybrid or even public could retain ownership of the self-service, and, therefore, the customer and the interface. This is a part of the vision for the future of IT that we call 'hybrid IT.'"
Additional information is available in the Gartner report: Five Things That Private Cloud Is Not
The Latest
The journey of maturing observability practices for users entails navigating peaks and valleys. Users have clearly witnessed the maturation of their monitoring capabilities, embraced DevOps practices, and adopted cloud and cloud-native technologies. Notwithstanding that, we witness the gradual increase of the Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR) for production issues year over year ...
Optimizing existing use of cloud is the top initiative — for the seventh year in a row, reported by 62% of respondents in the Flexera 2023 State of the Cloud Report ...
Gartner highlighted four trends impacting cloud, data center and edge infrastructure in 2023, as infrastructure and operations teams pivot to support new technologies and ways of working during a year of economic uncertainty ...
Developers need a tool that can be portable and vendor agnostic, given the advent of microservices. It may be clear an issue is occurring; what may not be clear is if it's part of a distributed system or the app itself. Enter OpenTelemetry, commonly referred to as OTel, an open-source framework that provides a standardized way of collecting and exporting telemetry data (logs, metrics, and traces) from cloud-native software ...
As SLOs grow in popularity their usage is becoming more mature. For example, 82% of respondents intend to increase their use of SLOs, and 96% have mapped SLOs directly to their business operations or already have a plan to, according to The State of Service Level Objectives 2023 from Nobl9 ...
Observability has matured beyond its early adopter position and is now foundational for modern enterprises to achieve full visibility into today's complex technology environments, according to The State of Observability 2023, a report released by Splunk in collaboration with Enterprise Strategy Group ...
Before network engineers even begin the automation process, they tend to start with preconceived notions that oftentimes, if acted upon, can hinder the process. To prevent that from happening, it's important to identify and dispel a few common misconceptions currently out there and how networking teams can overcome them. So, let's address the three most common network automation myths ...
Many IT organizations apply AI/ML and AIOps technology across domains, correlating insights from the various layers of IT infrastructure and operations. However, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has observed significant interest in applying these AI technologies narrowly to network management, according to a new research report, titled AI-Driven Networks: Leveling Up Network Management with AI/ML and AIOps ...
When it comes to system outages, AIOps solutions with the right foundation can help reduce the blame game so the right teams can spend valuable time restoring the impacted services rather than improving their MTTI score (mean time to innocence). In fact, much of today's innovation around ChatGPT-style algorithms can be used to significantly improve the triage process and user experience ...
Gartner identified the top 10 data and analytics (D&A) trends for 2023 that can guide D&A leaders to create new sources of value by anticipating change and transforming extreme uncertainty into new business opportunities ...