When choosing your private cloud, there are a few key components to consider, such as your platform & vendor. Check out the full post for more information!
While making the commitment to the cloud of your choice is half the battle, there are still a few major decisions organizations have to make. The two that take precedence are choosing your cloud platform and selecting your vendor, but what exactly should your company be looking for?
1. Selecting the right private cloud platform
A traditional Platform-as-a-Service stack includes the storage, networking, servers, operating system, middleware, and the virtualized/container-based environment. All in all, the PaaS provides businesses with everything required for the hosting of its data and applications.
So the question then becomes, which factors of the private cloud platform warrant the greatest consideration?
2. Geographic dependencies
Regulations and legislation, particularly where data is concerned, largely depends on the geographic location of the company. Therefore, the private cloud services could potentially span geographies, thus requiring the platform it is built on to manage these variations. This is where policy-based automation can potentially step in and mitigate any resulting issues.
3. Automation
Most, if not all, businesses are based on policies, processes, and transactions. Automation fits in by efficiently and accurately translating these operational elements into actions that support them. Automation is typically achieved through a framework that takes into account resource provisioning, cloud environment monitoring and management, and reporting on areas like billing and resource lifecycle management.
The single, most critical automated function within the private cloud has to do with the identification and authentication of users. Should a user request services, the system is responsible for ensuring that they are in fact authorized to make the request in question. If they are, the automation then uses a workflow engine to obtain authorizations, locate and provision resources, and balance workloads to optimize performance. Automation can also play a significant role in the adherence to both business policy and regulatory requirements by handling tasks in a uniform, predictable, and policy-based way.
4. Data security
The concept of data encryption as a method of ensuring its security isn't new. That being said, the processor overhead involved where public cloud vendors are concerned sometimes limits the extent to which they will cover a customer's database and everything in it. There's also the issues of understanding the encryption policies of a public cloud provider, and whether they have the capacity to cover all of an organization's needs. Additionally, due to the fact that private clouds are a growing part of the hybrid cloud scenario, it is becoming significantly more important to manage encryption on the enterprise side.
