Last month I pointed out that cloud computing is influencing internal IT, including the redevelopment of traditional data centers around SOA and cloud computing concepts -- or private clouds. Indeed, through 2012, Gartner forecasts IT organizations will spend more money on private cloud computing investments than on offerings from public cloud providers.
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The top three reasons that enterprises are looking at private clouds are:
Security and privacy. Many Global 2000 companies are not ready to trust public cloud providers. They also worry about the providers giving up their data to the authorities or competitors, or just losing it all together.
Efficiency. Most nonvirtualized servers run at about 1 to 5 percent of capacity most of the time. The use of virtualization allows you to do much more with much less, and that's the name of the game in IT today.
Control. While most CIOs will talk about the advantages of using public cloud computing, and perhaps point to their Salesforce.com subscription as proof that cloud computing is part of their portfolio, the thought of using servers that they can't touch is still a bit disconcerting to many in IT.
So what are the issues you should consider when implementing a private cloud?
First, despite the fact that you'll maintain this thing within your own data center, don't neglect security. Security should be designed into the private cloud, and it needs to be implemented in a really systemic way, not simply as a layer of software.