Private cloud builds a strong foundation for hybrid cloud future

In a 2014 poll of over 600 worldwide IT decision makers, Current Analysis found that 58% of the respondents who use cloud services based them on private cloud environments and 28% extended them to the public cloud in the form of a hybrid cloud solution. These results mirror the concerns of respondents who overwhelmingly listed ‘security’ and ‘data privacy’ as their top two issues when undertaking a cloud initiative. According to Current Analysis, this goes a long way in validating the market interest in private and eventually, hybrid cloud solutions.

"The public cloud is here to stay, having proven its value within the mid-market through sheer economies of scale, but an even deeper value arises from an increased level of platform standardisation and service orchestration often associated with platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform," says Brad Shimmin, Service Director for Business Technology and Software at Current Analysis. "It was inevitable that enterprise customers would begin looking for similar capabilities within their own data centers, building service layers capable of emulating and even connecting with the public cloud, all from within trusted corporate confines."

Building a private cloud within the enterprise data center ensures core automation and self-service capabilities of the cloud, while maintaining control of corporate data within an enterprise’s own physical data center. A strong private cloud strategy also provides opportunities to expand non-critical workloads to the public cloud in the form of a hybrid solution that offers the best of both worlds.

Current Analysis research identifies a number of key points for developing this new private cloud coverage:
Data security and privacy remain the top two concerns IT managers have about adopting cloud technologies.
Companies with reservations about putting their data on the public cloud can still benefit from the efficiency of cloud technology by adopting a private cloud solution.
A well-planned private cloud strategy is a good first step to delivering the next generation of IT services for companies of any size.
By its very nature, a private cloud solution offers IaaS-, PaaS- and SaaS-like functionalities that can be easily customised to meet the specific needs of both internal and external IT users.
The increasing interest in hybrid cloud strategies means that a good private cloud solution must offer the flexibility to extend to include a variety of public cloud offerings as needs change.