Considering the Role of a Private IaaS

Why would a company choose to implement a private version of IaaS? There are two compelling reasons:

The company sees itself as a service provider to its employees and partners.

The company needs to control access because of security concerns.

So, a company selecting a private approach creates a pool of resources that can be standardized and easily reused by the IT organization to complete projects. Why standardize? In an IaaS service, IT projects are created in predictable ways. For example, a process might be designed to set up a test environment for code or provision storage to support an application. While certain nuances are different, 80 percent of the time the process within IaaS can be standardized. By standardizing these infrastructure services, the organization gains efficiencies, fewer inadvertent errors, and consistency in managing the development lifecycle. This is the same approach used by a public IaaS vendor to control its costs.

Another benefit of a private cloud service is overall manageability. One of the overarching benefits of IaaS is the ability to gain access to an image or copy of a set of resources via a self-service process.

Although a public cloud vendor uses the self-service portal to ensure that the customer pays for the service, IaaS can be used differently in the private cloud. When a developer provisions a resource from a private cloud, IT management makes sure that when a project is completed, the resource (for example, compute resources or storage) is returned to the pool of resources. This way, IT can better control not only the resources available for projects, but also costs, utilization, and security.

Although a public cloud vendor uses the self-service portal to ensure that the customer pays for the service, IaaS can be used differently in a private cloud. When a developer provisions a resource from a private cloud, IT management can make sure that when a project is completed, the resource (for example, compute resources or storage) is returned to the pool of resources. In this way, IT can better control what resources are available for projects and can control costs, utilization, and security. How IT charges the internal customer is a matter of the business’s policy.