The private cloud: Does it fit in with your data centre infrastructure?  

This begs the question – is a private cloud the right option for your business? Here are five use cases that demonstrate the best use of private cloud and subsequently provide a higher return on investment:

Development and Test
Development and testing is a great use case for the private cloud. Since little training on how to use the cloud is required for test engineers and developers, it can be used as soon as it is set up. Development requires fast and easy access to resources as well as the ability to configure these dynamically. As such, infrequent access to multiple servers is needed for measuring and testing loads. A private cloud is able to provide quality assurance and development teams with a pool of shared resources, meaning they are able to provision the appropriate resources when required, and de-provision these once finished. Developers also add value to the cloud since they become more aware of its capabilities – they can then use it to design new apps by building cloud-ready workloads for additional use-cases. As such, the speed of deployment cycles for new apps is increased due to the more efficient testing environment.

New business opportunities
A new business venture is often difficult to set up and can be an expensive mistake if it fails. In an environment where the datacentre is static, taking advantage of varying market dynamics through experimentation and speed can be a challenge. On the other hand, with a private cloud, companies have the ability to quickly roll out their pool of available IT assets to test out a new venture. Should it be successful, it can then be scaled up – if it is unsuccessful, the resources can be deployed elsewhere with no hassle. Business units can use the private cloud to their advantage in this scenario, allowing them to experiment faster and limit potential losses as they do so.

Peak loads
In any business, there are times when more computing capacity is needed. This can be anticipated in advance for spikes in traffic over the festive period, for example, while at other times the need for more computing power can come as a surprise – such as after a successful promotion. In the past organisations have had to over-provision to ensure they have enough capacity. However, the private cloud enables organisations to streamline their response to peak loads.

The business is also able to capitalise on external public clouds, automatically moving work outside the datacentre to gain additional capacity. This hybrid approach gives organisations the flexibility to quickly and easily increase and decrease capacity, solving problems without over-provisioning and subsequently keeping costs down.
Batch and data processing applications

Not only do batch and data processing applications require significant amounts of computing power, they also run for short periods of time and are all standardised and time-sensitive. The standardisation of these apps means they can easily be added to the private cloud’s self-service catalogue, deployed rapidly, and finally closed down once the task is complete. Workloads such as these can also benefit from the hybrid cloud approach in the same way as the peak load solutions. Dedicated resources are not required as the private cloud provides the scalability and flexibility needed to meet the application’s short term needs.

Geographic expansion
Businesses looking to get closer to their customers will often look to expand their global footprint by increasing the number of physical locations in their portfolio, such as new factories or stores. In the past, these new locations had standardised apps and IT systems, requiring a lengthy set-up process and frequent on-site maintenance.

With the private cloud, organisations can manage resources centrally. As such, new locations can be established without having to send staff to the site itself. This lowers costs and allows the company to expand geographically while continuing to grow revenue.