The Resurgence of Private and Hybrid Cloud: Why Enterprises Are Rethinking Their Cloud Strategies
By Todd Matters, Chief Technology Officer, RackWare
In today's dynamic IT landscape, there's a noticeable shift as enterprises gravitate back toward private cloud solutions. While public cloud platforms have been at the forefront of discussions in recent years, many organizations are now recognizing the distinct advantages that private cloud infrastructures offer. This renewed interest is driven by a desire for enhanced security, greater control over resources, and the imperative to meet stringent compliance requirements—all while retaining the flexibility and scalability that cloud environments provide.
The Case for Private Cloud
Private cloud environments present businesses with dedicated resources, leading to improved performance and reliability. Unlike public clouds, where resources are shared among multiple tenants, private clouds offer an isolated environment tailored to an organization's specific needs. This isolation not only bolsters security but also allows for customized configurations that can optimize workload performance.
Furthermore, with the increasing complexity of regulatory frameworks, especially in industries like healthcare and finance, private clouds provide a compliance-friendly environment. Organizations can implement precise access controls, data residency policies, and audit mechanisms to meet regulatory standards without compromising agility.
Enabling Private Cloud
Amazon offers a hardware Private Cloud solution called Outposts which is a tightly integrated solution that can be run in a pure Private Cloud or more advanced Hybrid cloud configuration. The hardware is a family of fully managed solutions delivering AWS infrastructure and services to virtually any on-premises or edge location. Outposts provides the same set of services on premises and in the cloud.
With AWS Outposts, you can run some AWS services locally and connect to a broad range of services available in the local AWS Region. Run applications and workloads on premises using familiar AWS services, tools, and APIs. Outposts supports workloads and devices requiring low latency access to on-premises systems, local data processing, data residency, and application migration with local system interdependencies.
Microsoft offers Azure Stack in 3 flavors, HCI, Hub, and Edge. HCI a Hyper is a hyperconverged infrastructure cluster solution that hosts virtualized Windows and Linux workloads and their storage in a hybrid environment that combines on-premises infrastructure with Azure cloud services. HCI provides the most Azure “look and feel” of the 3 offerings. HUB focuses more on Platform as a Service (PaaS), Web apps, and other packaged solutions. Azure Stack Edge is designed for deployment in edge locations such as retail, telecommunications, manufacturing, or even healthcare.
Oracle’s Private Cloud Appliance (PCA) is a combined hardware software solution that delivers the same interfaces, automation, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) experience as the public cloud but operates entirely within an organization’s data center. Additionally, Oracle Cloud@Customer extends the benefits of Oracle Cloud services into the customer’s own data center, delivering a fully managed cloud environment behind the organization’s firewall. This model is ideal for businesses looking for a fully managed Private Cloud with strict data residency, security, or regulatory requirements but still seeking a cloud-native experience.
Another interesting hardware offering is HPE GreenLake. Unlike Oracle PCA, Azure stack, and Outposts, GreenLake supports any software stack a customer chooses. While it can work with various public clouds, GreenLake itself won't provide the single management UI and seamless ability to provision workloads on dedicated and shared infrastructure. This distinguishes GreenLake from Outposts and Azure Stack.
Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Considerations
The debate over the use of Public Cloud is long over. Early concerns about security and performance are no longer debated; today every Enterprise business utilizes Public Cloud. And with the emergence of viable Private Cloud many enterprises are adopting Hybrid Cloud strategies to bridge private and public environments creating an ecosystem of Cloud services to meet the vast and diverse requirements of both legacy and modernized applications.