Private clouds: the end is nigh

The word "cloud" gets thrown around a lot these days, and as a result has begun to lose its meaning. Public, private, hybrid – the lines between them have begun to blur as technologies have evolved and, really, the terminology has become irrelevant.

The graph below shows the number of worldwide Google searches "cloud computing". As we can see, no one was searching for it before 2007, search was at its highest around 2011-12 as the buzz peaked and it's now dropping down again as "cloud" becomes the new norm.

Admittedly, the title of this blog may be a little extreme. It's not so much a case of private cloud ceasing to exist, but more that term will more than likely be obsolete in the next year or two. A private cloud is simply a cloud that belongs to one company. Within the next couple of years, the technology behind creating "private clouds" will be the norm for any on-premise IT, or even "private" clouds hosted externally. So it won't be known as a private cloud, it'll just be your IT.

While private clouds do have the benefits of automation and management like their multi-tenant counterparts, public clouds will always have the advantage of flexibility – which is why we predict adoption figures will continue to rise. Public clouds have the added benefits of allowing organisations to "burst" into them during peak times to accommodate for excess load. The cost benefits of this level of flexibility are clear – waste is limited during quiet periods, whilst you retain the ability to scale up at any point you need to during the year.

Security within multi-tenanted clouds has been brought into question in the past, but these fears were often unfounded. As understanding of different cloud offerings has grown, organisations have come to realise that data is often as secure in a public cloud as it would be in their own private cloud. In most cases, it was a fear of the unknown rather than a genuine security risk that caused hesitation. Now that most organisations are using at least one cloud-based service, the fear of that unknown has subsided.

There will always be organisations that need to keep certain functions in-house, however. Be this due to management, compliance, or financial reasons or even just personal preference. But private clouds are usually only used for specific and appropriate services or systems. As businesses start to take more decisive stance on which systems must stay in-house and which can potentially be moved to the cloud, we will see greater adoption of both public and hybrid clouds. Analysts predict that over half of businesses will have implemented some sort of hybrid cloud deployment in place by the end of 2017.

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