Private cloud offers almost all the benefits of a public cloud, without the security and privacy headaches, per Jim Whitehurst, President and CEO of RedHat.
If an agency is running more than 1,000 servers, it could save money and become more flexible with its processor resources by building an internal cloud-computing infrastructure. A private cloud could offer almost all the benefits of a public cloud, but without the attendant security and privacy headaches. "There is a significant amount of value in a cloud infrastructure for a single entity that is running multiple programs and multiple data centers," Whitehurst said, speaking at the Federal [Information Technology] on a Budget Forum held this week in Washington.
"What is the benefit of a public cloud? For most large agencies in the government, or even medium-sized agencies, there is a not a lot of purchasing cost advantage with going to a third-party cloud," Whitehurst said. "The real benefit is getting high utilization of your existing infrastructure and flexibility around that."
At present, Red Hat has more than 50 enterprise customers with private clouds. "They are seeing huge benefits [by] running clouds themselves," Whitehurst said. He mentioned that one customer he spoke with, a chief information officer of a large organization running 25,000 processors, told him that public-cloud services such as Amazon would not provide much of a cost advantage to his organization, as his company could obtain servers at almost the same cost as those providers.
To set up a private cloud, an agency would pool all of its servers and offer the processing power to each department. It could enjoy the economies of scale that clouds could provide, and not worry about the privacy and security concerns that dog public-cloud providers, according to Whitehurst. It could also sign agreements with other agencies or organizations whose peak processing times are different from its own in order to have extra computing capacity on hand for those periods with the heaviest workloads.
Whitehurst said that today's public-cloud offerings are mostly in the "vapourware" stage, adding that he sees this as not so usefuk for enterprise users, again due to the outstanding security and privacy issues. Building a private cloud, however, will help agencies get prepared for such time when and if public-cloud offerings become an alternative.
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