Private Cloud is Not Yet Dead: It’s Because of Data Control

Everyone wants security, privacy and information sovereignty. This is why private cloud has become popular in the years past. But, just recently, there have been some reports about private clouds being dead. Are these rumors true or are they merely exaggerated claims?

The truth is that far from being dead, the latest research revealed that it is expected for private clouds to grow at a similar rate as public clouds in the next five years. It will definitely not come as a surprise to those who have already worked with or in an enterprise IT operation. Even the giants in the public cloud are already starting to build large private clouds for their clients.

Despite the armchair pundits that claim that private cloud is nothing but a failure, both public and private clouds are now doing exceptional well and for all the obvious reasons.

Adoption of the cloud, whether it is private, public or hybrid, is growing just like the strategic challenges. The adoption of cloud strategy is not about a certain technology as much as this is all about transformation of organization, particularly IT transformation. Although it may be well known, there are some analysts and pundits who keep slipping into the debate about technology adoption, whether private clouds or public clouds are better than the other.

Such debates almost always stay away from the strategic challenges that CiOs encounter between the requirements of their business as well as the IT services they offer. With no organization transformation parallel to the clear objectives of the business, any cloud service will definitely go down the abyss sooner than later.

Also, there is the recognition that various businesses have different IT needs and not all of these fall into clean definition for cloud delivery. Unlike the narrow minded thinking among several pundits and analysts, there is actually no such thing as one true cloud. Although a certain business may have some web scale applications which call for IT resource elasticity, the other business may have requirements with a predictable or fixed workload.

For some businesses, IT is considered as pure overhead and they choose to outsource their IT infrastructure management. On the other hand, there are others that believe that internal IT management can drive business value. What is interesting here is that none of these are features which require a particular kind of cloud delivery.

However, there is a single consistent defining feature which can directly affect cloud delivery strategy and that is data control. It includes data sovereignty, privacy and security. Although elasticity, cost, agility, and deployment speed are all very crucial attributes of cloud deployment, no CIO will claim any of these to be of higher priority compared to data control.

Once again, it is not trying to claim that private clouds are better compared to public clouds. Instead, the main point here is that there is no way that private cloud is failing or worse, dying. Both these two options have strong value propositions according to the requirements of the business and it is validated by the adoption in the market of each.

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