Businesses that have outgrown their server room or small on-premises data center have several infrastructure hosting options to choose from. They can build a bigger data center, they can launch servers on a public cloud platform, or they can colocate their servers in a third-party data center.
None of these options is best in all circumstances, but a private cloud colocated in a world-class data center provides a balance of security, performance, cost control, and flexibility that is hard to beat.
A private cloud is architecturally identical to a public cloud platform. It uses the same virtualization and orchestration technology to provide on-demand server deployment, fast server scaling, and infrastructure automation. But only code and data owned by the owners of the underlying physical servers ever touches their private cloud.
Private cloud vs public cloud
The public cloud may offer improved cost control and increased flexibility compared to traditional server hosting options, but security, compliance, and performance issues make many businesses leery of putting critical infrastructure in the hands of a public cloud vendor, especially in the wake of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, the full impact of which has yet to be seen.
Colocation is inexpensive compared to the building and management of a data center, and it is unlikely that any but the largest of companies has the IT budget to build a data center with the redundancy, connectivity, and economies of scale available to an enterprise colocation provider.
A colocated private cloud provides businesses with a solution that optimizes IT infrastructure along several dimensions. It involves some capital expenditure for servers and associated hardware, but nowhere near as much as building a data center with the capabilities provided by the best colocation data centers.
From the perspective of users within the business, it provides the same flexibility and agility as the public cloud, but without the security risks, compliance difficulties, and performance issues that affect public cloud users. For larger deployments, owned hardware is often less expensive than the public cloud, as companies like DropBox have discovered.
Maximize server utilization
Low utilization is a major cost center for many IT departments. By maintaining control of the infrastructure and virtual server / container orchestration, private cloud users can make sure their infrastructure use is efficient and cost effective. Businesses can optimize infrastructure costs and increase server utilization by leveraging virtualization and orchestration technologies like OpenStack or Kubernetes for containerized applications.
A well managed and utilized private cloud makes considerable demands on the networking and power infrastructure of its host data center. To ensure reliability and availability, private cloud users should select a colocation data center provider capable of meeting their needs.
Cyber Wurx’ Atlanta colocation data center is the ideal venue for private cloud hosting. With service feeds from multiple metro service grids, 10 gigabit capacity on multiply redundant peers, and world-class physical and electronic security. To discuss hosting your private cloud in Cyber Wurx’s enterprise colocation data center, get in touch today.