private cloud

What is a private cloud?

Private cloud (also called internal cloud or corporate cloud) is a marketing term for a proprietary computing architecture that provides hosted services to a limited number of people behind a firewall.

Advances in virtualization and distributed computing have allowed corporate network and datacenter administrators to effectively become service providers that meet the needs of their "customers" within the corporation.

Marketing media that uses the words "private cloud" is designed to appeal to an organization that needs or wants more control over their data than they can get by using a third-party hosted service such as Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or Simple Storage Service (S3). 

Learn More About IT:
> John Foley writes about private clouds on InformationWeek.
> Kent Langley explains why he thinks private clouds will proliferate.
> Jian Zhen compares attributes of private and public clouds.
> According to Larry Ellison, cloud computing is simply the latest fashion in IT.

Learn more about Building a private cloud infrastructure

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