Compute clouds exist both outside of company data centers as well as on the inside. The external clouds are typically referred to as public clouds. It is in the public cloud that individuals, organizations and businesses can obtain a combination of compute capacity, storage and virtual networking in a pay as you go model. For individuals and organizations without regulatory compliance or business constraints the cloud services model meets their needs with an affordable solution.

When corporate compliance, data security & network access must be controlled, companies seek an internal alternative. The in-house alternative called the private cloud or the inside cloud runs within the company data center and provides the same type of on-demand services found in the public offerings. The private cloud enables the organization to respond to the needs of the business and quickly provision compute power and applications on-the-fly. From a compliance standpoint, the main benefit of the private cloud is complete control over the environment, the data storage and the security infrastructure.

Inside clouds are gaining momentum because they help the IT team to simplify and automate the routine tasks of bringing up compute capacity, configuring networks and providing users with self service capabilities. They also help to maximize the utilization of servers and can breathe new life into existing resources improving usable life and enhancing the return on investment. Implementing your own private cloud isn’t as difficult as it may seem. Start with these 10 basics and you’ll greatly enhance the service delivery of your IT department:

1. Provide on-demand compute capacity with the simplicity of a few clicks in a web browser
2. Standardize virtual environments, operating systems and applications to ensure corporate compliance and consistency
3. Enable end users to manage, monitor and repair their own virtual environments
4. Provide a web based administration console to enable distributed management and delegation of responsibilities
5. Take advantage of existing hardware, storage and network solutions
6. Automate manual tasks such as backups, clean up routines and system updates
7. Monitor physical servers and virtual environments for capacity issues
8. Meeter resource utilization including network traffic for reporting or charge back
9. Expand or contract the overall capacity of the platform with the addition of commodity hardware
10. Integrate elastic resources with your existing business processes to simplifying interactions across the company

Parallels can help you get started today with your own on-premise cloud to support developer testing, provide on-demand applications for departments and simplify your web hosting. Visit the Parallels Elastic IT solution overview for additional information.

Get started today with your own on-premise cloud to support developer testing, provide on-demand applications for departments and simplify your web hosting.