A lot of propaganda is going on about private cloud accomplishments. According to the professors of the theory, private cloud is securer than public cloud environment that is offered by third-party cloud computing services companies and is a multi-tenant environment. It is allowing organizations to retain complete control over their data and at the same time enjoy scalability, flexibility and agility of cloud computing model. Quite naturally a large number of firms are now intending on hosting their very own private cloud that can be secured behind their firewalls and ensures interoperability at the same time. Moreover, it introduces possibilities of cloud computing application development and testing. But, even before an organization embarks upon the journey of building private cloud it hits the stumbling block of making their internal infrastructure cloud ready.
Many of the IT managers believe (though wrongly) that installing virtualization setup on top of existing infrastructure is enough to introduce private cloud to the environment. But, it is far from that. Introduction of private cloud may demand complete IT infrastructural and policy modifications. Introduction of private cloud therefore calls for thorough IT audit that will not scratch the surface only but will go deeper in evaluating the situation inside out.
Cloud Focused Consolidation: Introducing private cloud will allow you to move and distribute workload, IT resources, storage space into a scalable environment. Virtualization technique has evolved since its initial days and your existing virtualization setup may be outdated. Also achieving cloud computing might not be your objective at that time. You can’t introduce virtualization setup on top of it without considering its compatibility. So, you may have to make your server structure cloud prepared before adding the layer of virtualization.
Evaluating the Surrounding: The next step may involve evaluating possibilities of hosting your storage, networking and legacy software to the virtualized space. Transferring legacy software to the virtualized climate may not always be possible without significantly restructuring the code of the existing software. Moreover, even if the transfer is possible there is always a chance of losing performance and data relevancy in virtualized climate. So, before introducing private cloud model you therefore would need to evaluate your possibilities of recoding existing structure or seeking consultation of cloud application service provider.
Implementing Charge-back: Cost of private cloud computing can soar very quickly unless monitored. Introducing chargeback will help you measure resource usage and therefore, help in managing costs. Cloud allows you to acquire more resources easily, often without human intervention, when demand escalates. This can quickly lead to resource usage mismanagement. As of now, very few corporate implement proper method of chargeback which requires every department to be charged separately for resource use.
