The future of computing is both public and private cloud. It may seem that public cloud – dominated by AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google – is now the norm, but companies will continue to run workloads that are best suited to be on premises. There are three main reasons for this. First, with large volume of data generated on-prem, storage and compute power need to be close since latency and distance are major issues. Second, there are studies which prove that consumption-based services offered by public cloud can be quite expensive after a certain threshold. Thus we hear some companies pulling back their storage and compute on premises to save money. Third, compliance and data sovereignty requirement by organization and governments are better controlled on-prem.

The challenge for most companies is how to build and operate on premises private cloud. Most companies have traditional data centers which are not suited any longer for delivering and maintaining reliable compute, storage, and network services to the rapidly changing business requirements. They should build and operate a private cloud that have the same characteristics of a public cloud – including on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service (read my blog on the Characteristics of a True Private Cloud).

Fortunately, companies such as VMware now offer a single integrated solution that enable companies to build and operate private cloud. For instance, the VMware Cloud Foundation based on underlying hyperconverged hardware (e.g. DellEMC VxRail), provides software-defined services for compute, storage, networking, security and cloud management to run enterprise traditional or containerized applications. It extended its VMware vSphere server virtualization platform with integrated software-defined storage (vSAN), networking (NSX), cloud management (vRealize suite), and security capabilities that can be consumed flexibly on premises. In addition, VMware Cloud Foundation delivers IT automation based on blueprints (templates), which embeds both automation and policy, and when executed will automatically orchestrate the provisioning and lifecycle of all the components in the blueprint.

Although some features are still not at par with the public cloud (such as the ease of self-service provisioning) , private cloud will continue to improve as more technologies are integrated or built on top of this private cloud foundation.