Dedicated Private Clouds and Why You Need One

Dedicated private cloud is a form of cloud environment where enterprises have more control over their data, resources, and applications. It’s considered one of the newest buzzwords in business hosting.

But how do you understand if it’s the precise hosting solution for you? And what makes it different from other cloud computing environments?

On this guide, we’ll answer these questions and take a look at features to think about when adopting dedicated private cloud architecture. 

A dedicated private cloud is a single-tenant environment where computing resources are reserved for the exclusive use of a single organization. In other words, a personal cloud environment is devoted solely to your use, providing you with more control, high security, and more customization options.

The hardware is usually hosted on-premises, where the organization’s IT team is liable for managing the hardware and maintenance. It may also exist off-premises in vendor-owned data centers where the cloud service provider hosts the infrastructure under a subscription or lease plan.

A dedicated private cloud is suitable for big organizations in search of more control over their cloud setup.

While a dedicated private cloud is a dedicated server within the cloud, a virtual private cloud (VPC) is an isolated pool of resources contained inside a public cloud setting. It’s a form of virtual machine where you get a subsection of the general public cloud, meaning you won’t share resources with other users. It’s accessible via a secure connection like a VPN and could be scaled on demand.

A VPC isn’t ideal for businesses subject to strict regulatory standards since workloads are hosted outside their very own physical data center. And may something occur to your Web connection, your VPC might change into unreachable.

With a dedicated private cloud, resources like CPU and RAM are dedicated to a single organization. It’s built in keeping with the precise needs of an enterprise and lacks the problems inherent in a shared server setup. 

Overall, a dedicated private cloud offers the best levels of security, availability, and uptime in comparison with a VPC. It also includes stricter compliance capabilities. 

A dedicated private cloud brings with it a number of advantages to assist your corporation and ensure it really works for you as an alternative of your organization working around limitations.

One advantage of a dedicated private cloud setup is the flexibility to customize your infrastructure in keeping with your unique requirements. This includes configuring server settings and installing specialized software. 

You get complete control over the environment, unlike a public cloud setup, where the initial configuration options the host provides limit your control.

As cybercrimes and data breaches proceed to plague firms, the importance of security is monumental. With a dedicated private cloud, you get the next level of security than a shared or multi-tenant environment. That’s because you possibly can implement more robust security measures, reminiscent of intrusion detection systems, hardware firewalls, access control mechanisms, and encryption. Briefly, you possibly can adopt your individual security processes relatively than being on the mercy of shared security across multiple organizations.

One key feature of virtualization is that it means that you can leverage underused servers. You possibly can move workloads to those servers to maximise resource usage. This also implies that you won’t should purchase additional resources when needed. So on top of optimizing usage, you possibly can reduce costs. 

Overall, a dedicated private cloud can allocate resources more efficiently, making it easier to administer workloads and cut costs.

There’s no denying that a dedicated private cloud can include significant upfront costs. That being said, the initial investment pays off big in the long term, as costs are likely to be more predictable and transparent. And also you don’t should worry about outages from one other tenant hogging resources or their lax security causing an expensive data breach for you.

The one-tenancy nature of a personal cloud also means it’s easier to predict monthly costs. This is very true for businesses with regular workloads. 

The general public cloud can include hidden extra charges, reminiscent of bandwidth usage, resulting in monthly costs that could be higher than expected.

A dedicated private cloud has higher standards for compliance. It means that you can comply with strict industry-specific regulations or data privacy laws like HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and GDPR. It’s especially useful for finance, banking, or health firms as they handle highly sensitive data. 

There are also stiff legal or financial penalties for non-compliance, making the price of non-compliance far greater than the prices related to staying compliant. For example, you possibly can be fined as much as 20 million euros (roughly $21.9 million USD) if present in violation of GDPR. Plus, having to notify customers of a breach could cause lasting damage to your repute. 

Since only your organization has access to computing resources, you’ll get high performance, ensuring a greater user experience. In a shared server environment, tenants compete for resources, meaning a user might suffer performance drops if one other tenant uses an excessive amount of. 

A dedicated private cloud offers easy scaling in response to growing demand. Specifically, you possibly can achieve this through vertical scaling or horizontal scaling. 

Virtual scaling refers to adding more resources to existing infrastructure, leading to increased capability. It’s especially useful for resource-intensive applications.Horizontal scaling means adding more virtual machines to your system to distribute the load across them. This approach is beneficial for applications with high concurrency.

Before adopting a dedicated private cloud hosting model, there are specific aspects to think about:

When preparing for the shift, start by evaluating your corporation requirements. Have a look at workload demands, security needs, compliance requirements, and your budget. Doing so will aid you know what technical details you would like from a personal cloud environment.

When you opt to deploy or host a dedicated private cloud on-premises, you’ll need to concentrate on the associated costs. Things like servers, network equipment, physical data centers, storage services, and software licenses require significant capital expenditure. 

You need to bear in mind the continuing maintenance costs to maintain things functioning as they need to or to make sure optimal performance.

Moving to a dedicated private cloud setup also entails integrating existing applications with this environment. Certain applications might need re-architecting to achieve the advantages of the cloud. Nonetheless, modernizing these applications could be difficult and take time.

Liquid Web helps solve that problem with VMware Private Cloud, which helps you to use older applications easily. This manner, you possibly can kickstart your private cloud journey without worrying about compatibility issues.

Many IT teams aren’t equipped to deploy and manage a dedicated private cloud environment – having to reconfigure the information center infrastructure to accommodate private cloud technologies, for instance.

While you host the servers yourself or select an unmanaged host, you’re on the hook for all of the technical needs. But an unmanaged dedicated private cloud isn’t your only option. You possibly can go for managed services when you lack in-house expertise or have a small IT team. On this scenario, you offload the burden of managing your dedicated private cloud to a service provider. 

Take the dedicated VMware private cloud at Liquid Web, for instance. They handle your complete infrastructure, including hardware, providing you with time to give attention to higher-priority activities. Plus, they supply proactive monitoring across the clock to make sure every little thing runs easily. If that isn’t enough, they supply industry-leading technical support.

And selecting a managed dedicated private cloud solution reduces the entire cost of ownership (TCO), making it even cheaper.

As we all know, security threats are ever-changing, and malicious threat actors are getting smarter. Insider attacks also pose a risk to security. 

So, despite the control you get with a dedicated private cloud environment, adopting a proactive security stance is crucial. In any case, the prices related to a breach could be staggering. In line with a 2023 IBM report, a breach within the U.S. ends in costs of $9.48 million USD, up from $9.44 million in 2022.

Physical security measures are also crucial on your servers. For example, Liquid Web data centers include motion-detecting security cameras and locked cases.

When you’ve arrange a dedicated private cloud, you’ll have to watch it to make sure it is working properly. That is easiest if you have got your servers on-site or with a managed host that handles monitoring and maintenance for you.

Besides checking performance, monitoring means that you can:

• discover and mitigate potential security threats.
• track resource consumption to avoid unnecessary costs.
• understand resource demands to plan for future growth effectively.

When organising a dedicated private cloud environment, you’ll also need to take a position in capability planning. That’s because a dedicated private cloud doesn’t include limitless resources. The available physical hardware constrains it.

It’s horizontally scalable, but it’s possible you’ll need additional hardware for vertical scaling when you max out the resources in your current server. So you have to plan ahead and be able to scale up at the precise time. 

And that’s where capability planning comes into play. Capability planning tools like resource quotas can aid you track resource usage so you possibly can avoid being surprised by how much capability you would like.

Adopting a dedicated private cloud hosting environment generally is a worthwhile endeavor. It allows you to enjoy the advantages of the cloud while still allowing you to take care of control of sensitive data and performance.

And when paired with the precise managed hosting solution, there’s almost no limit to what you possibly can achieve.

At Liquid Web, we offer managed private cloud hosting tailored to your needs. Our hosting solution includes industry-leading uptime, the best levels of security, and predictable pricing. Plus, it is a scalable cloud service.