Private cloud is a type of cloud computing that delivers similar advantages to public cloud, including scalability and self-service, but through a proprietary architecture. Unlike public clouds, which deliver services to multiple organizations, a private cloud is dedicated to a single organization.
Public and private cloud deployment models differ. Public clouds, such as those from Amazon Web Services or Google Compute Engine, share a computing infrastructure across different users, business units or businesses. However, these shared computing environments aren’t suitable for all businesses, such as those with mission-critical workloads, security concerns, uptime requirements or management demands. Instead, these businesses can provision a portion of their existing data centre as an on-premises — or private — cloud.
A private cloud offers hosted services to a limited number of people behind a firewall, so it minimizes the security concerns some organizations have around cloud. Private cloud also gives companies direct control over their data.
A private cloud provides the same basic benefits of public cloud. These include self-service and scalability; multi-tenancy; the ability to provision machines; changing computing resources on-demand; and creating multiple machines for complex computing jobs, such as big data.