Cloud services have been segregated by the way the service is provided. Public cloud is the most popular of the three types. Companies like Google, AWS and Azure offer public cloud services.

Private cloud service providers customize the public cloud for better security and control. Organizations like banks and financial service providers that need to store and process sensitive data prefer a private cloud. Financial organizations want to leverage the distributed computing nature or the on demand availability of resources that the cloud computing platform affords them but at the same time do not want to put out confidential data in the public domain. VMware and OpenStack are private cloud providers.

Private cloud will have these features listed below:

Better security and privacy: Through use of firewalls and resource pooling with restricted access, dedicated leased networks, and internal hosting of services private clouds provide greater security and privacy.

Enhanced control: A private cloud is custom created to serve a single organization. The organization concerned configures and manages a networked solution to meet their needs.

Cost efficient: An organization can achieve dynamic allocation of resources based on demand with a private cloud. A private cloud affords its user flexibility. However, it is not as cost effective in comparison with a public cloud due to smaller economy of scale and increased ongoing management cost. They offer better use of resources than a traditional LAN in terms of bandwidth utilization. A private cloud being energy efficient, it reduces an organization’s carbon footprint too.

Compliance: Organizations that need to comply with HIPAA, Sarbanes Oxley, PCI use private cloud for their deliverance.

Increased uptime: Clouds allow enterprises to leverage the benefits that virtualization offers. Computing resources such as memory, processing power are hosted and managed internally by some users of private clouds through their data centers; use of virtualized operating system builds resilience into the private cloud. At times, the cloud may be hosted by a third party, in which case the failure of one server allows the enterprise to leverage the services of unaffected ones, thus providing an uninterrupted computing environment.

On the other hand, public clouds make use of a shared computing environment that includes the network infrastructure. That makes it unsuitable for enterprises that work on mission critical data, have security concerns or higher uptime requirements.

The disadvantages of using a private cloud are that with an in-premise data center, the company still has to bear the staffing, management and administration, capital expenditures as in a traditional data centre setup. That is quite not in keeping with the idea behind using a cloud in the first place, reduce Capex. In addition, you are unable to achieve the economies of scale that you can with a public cloud.