Private Cloud Hosting
A private cloud is a model of cloud computing designed for the sole use of your organisation. As your organisation is the only one to have access to the resources, hence a higher level of control, customisation, security and privacy is possible.
A private cloud usually includes the following components:
- Dedicated Servers
- Virtualisation Hypervisors
- Virtualisation/Cloud Management System
- Storage - single or pair of SANs (often with hardware failover)
- Firewall(s) - single or pair
- Local Network
- Load Balancers (physical, virtual or software)
- Backup Software or Service
- Management and Monitoring
- Dual Site Solutions - Replication and/or failover between two physical sites
- We can support true physical diversity with datacentres in both Edinburgh and London inter-connected by a high capacity diverse network
- Interconnections to customer premises using VLANs, private circuits or wavelengths.
Physical resources can be hosted either internally or externally, and can be accessed across private lines or encrypted connections through public networks.
To a certain extent, a basic private cloud is essentially virtualised dedicated servers pooled together.
Private Cloud Benefits
Greater control and bespoke design
Your private cloud will only be accessible by your organisation which means that Extraordinary will be able to configure and manage it according to your company needs. This higher level of control makes it easier to customise your environment and benefit from a truly bespoke cloud solution.
A Private Cloud can be configured to fulfil your business’s exact hosting needs. Those needs may include specific storage requirements, specific security design or the implementation of tailored resource management. As each VMware Private Cloud is designed from the ground up, there is special provision for growth and your business’s changing needs.
Increased security and privacy
Although public clouds offer a certain level of security, your private cloud can be build using a comprehensive set of techniques to ensure that your operations are kept out of reach of potential intruders. These techniques include electronic separation and isolation technologies such as firewalls, VPNs, authentication and encryption. The combination of those techniques provide a ring fenced environment that is private and secure.
Many of our customer have found that dedicated resources in a private cloud can bring significant savings compared to hyper-scale clouds like AWS or Azure. This is particularly true of services that are CPU or bandwidth intensive.
Energy efficiency
Better use of computer resources helps reduce your organisation’s carbon footprint.
Improved reliability
In a virtualised environment, the network is more resilient in the event of a physical infrastructure failure since virtual partitions can pull their resource from unaffected servers. Also, for private clouds hosted with third parties, the organisation benefits from the highly secure physical infrastructure of the data centre where the private cloud is physically hosted.
Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery
Our managed Business Continuity (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR) service allows you to rest assured that your business critical data is safely stored, backed up or replicated. Learn more about BC
To go further, your organisation can adopt a Hybrid Cloud strategy where Private Clouds are integrated with hyper-scaler clouds like AWS or Azure. The Hybrid Cloud model allows for maximum efficiency with automated allocation of functions according to their sensitivity.
VMWare and Microsoft Private Cloud Options
We have many enterprise customers running private clouds, some on VMWare, others on Microsoft. We have long standing experience in this field and we anticipate supporting both vendors in the future.
By providing additional security, a private cloud is the perfect solution for businesses dealing with highly sensitive data while still being able to benefit from cloud advantages such as pooled resources, self-service, elasticity and pay-as-you-use.
