The Advantages of Private Cloud in a Multicloud Environment

It is a widely held belief that the future of cloud adoption for organizations is multicloud, meaning multiple hyperscale public clouds. The driving factors for this trend range from avoiding vendor lock-in and risk diversification to being ready and able to leverage the best cloud capabilities wherever they run. Some institutions will go a step further and plan to retain an on-premises operation — a hybrid multicloud — in order to keep tight control on their data and maintain some workloads in a private data center. 

What is sometimes overlooked is that hosted private cloud plays a major part in either scenario.

Why consider private cloud?

The most important reason that private cloud needs to be a part of any business’s multicloud strategy is quite simple: Not all workloads can harness the benefits of the public cloud. In instances where an application can't exploit the public cloud's features, the operational costs there can surpass those of a private cloud.

And there are other reasons for including a private cloud option in a multicloud strategy. Consider business data; does it matter from a compliance perspective where data is stored? If the answer is yes, then a dedicated private cloud solution can give a higher level of assurance regarding its location than public cloud. Also, in a multicloud operation, that data is likely to be shared between the different clouds, which means that transfers of the data from one cloud to another can result in data-egress fees. Rackspace Data Freedom can help you minimize these costs.

A managed hosted private cloud can offer many advantages over an on-premises installation. Most notably a hosted private cloud doesn’t require an organization to maintain an on-premises data center and all of the physical security, HVAC, utility charges and appliance racking, stacking and cabling that comes with it. A fully managed private cloud, as offered by Rackspace Technology, goes a step further and operates and maintains the private cloud as a service, allowing the organization to focus its scarce resources on more strategic projects that will drive business growth.

Many businesses set out on a journey to adopt public cloud technology with the full expectation that they will soon be able to exit their on-premises data center, only to find that it was almost impossible and prohibitively expensive to migrate some workloads because of the technical debt associated with them. For others, it’s a strategic decision to keep mission-critical applications close by, but with escalating real estate costs and the challenge of retaining skilled resources to run the operation, these organizations are now on the lookout for a new solution. Enter managed hosted private cloud. 

There are extraordinary advantages to adopting a hosted private cloud as part of a multicloud strategy:

• A hosted private cloud enables the elimination of on-premises data centers:
  • • Legacy workloads are easily accommodated in a private cloud
    • Customized infrastructure can be provisioned for specialized workloads
    • Real estate costs are usually reduced

• Data sovereignty and compliance is more straight forward with a dedicated private cloud
• Data transfer charges can be minimized if a private cloud is made the primary data store in a multicloud environment
• With a dedicated private cloud, there is no danger of noisy neighbors impacting performance

Most managed service providers that offer private cloud solutions will be able to deliver many of these advantages, but for organizations committed to a hybrid multicloud strategy, the benefits of a partner such as Rackspace Technology lies in the skills, expertise and services it can deliver — not just in private cloud, but across the main hyperscalers and vertically through the IT stack of security, infrastructure, applications and data.

While numerous organizations grapple with legacy IT operations and gradually transition to public cloud services for newer applications, the challenge remains: how to optimize IT efficiency in this hybrid landscape? Central to these discussions is balancing the risks associated with technology adaptation against the costs of modernization. The key lies in strategically integrating legacy systems with newer cloud solutions and ensuring both operational resilience and cost-effectiveness.

Industry-specific regulations will influence a business's approach to risk. Consequently, some organizations insist on storing data exclusively on their own infrastructure, overseen solely by in-house teams. For others, while specific regulations might not be a primary concern, the idea of sharing storage infrastructure remains unappealing. Furthermore, vital business applications like ERP, CRM and HR systems are often custom-tailored to unique needs, making it difficult to transition to the public cloud without substantial refactoring (modernization). For many, such an overhaul is simply not economically feasible.

In situations like these, a managed hosted private cloud offers a compelling solution. It allows businesses to decrease expenses by moving away from on-premises data centers, all while maintaining a balanced risk profile and sidestepping the high cost of application refactoring.

Conclusion 

Industry experts agree that it’s a multicloud future, but this doesn’t mean only public clouds. In fact, the arguments for putting a private cloud at the center of a hybrid multicloud estate are strong. Not only can it act as a hyperscale-neutral data repository, solving any data residency issues and easing compliance processes, it also offers a cost-effective route for accommodating those legacy applications that won’t go away or are all but impossible to modernize.

The future is hybrid multicloud, and the key to success is having an expert partner, such as Rackspace Technology, who can advise, transform, manage and optimize your data, applications and security across both public and private clouds.