A Private Cloud environment gives organisations their own cloud infrastructure to use as they wish. Unlike the Public Cloud with which you have to share the Cloud infrastructure with other users, the Private Cloud is completely isolated and is developed to meet the specific needs of an organisation.
One of the most common reasons for customers choosing Cloud server hosting is the amount of storage that the environment can achieve. One of the biggest demands of any modern business is storage capacity as crucial business information is stored electronically more often than not, and when you consider the number of documents the average business has archived, that can add up to a massive storage requirement.
Whilst Cloud hardware nodes take care of the hosting of the Virtual Machines themselves, storage is handled by specific machines known as SANs (Storage Area Networks); the purpose of hosting storage separately from the main hardware nodes is that SANs can provide greater redundancy for critical business information along with greater data security.
Storage Area Networks
Cloud SANs are popular with enterprise IT companies because they represent a platform that can be scaled geographically across multiple sites, whereas previously SANs were limited to the site on which they were hosted.
In the context of a Private Cloud, they are a single central accessible point for storage that can be accessed by any other hardware in the Cloud; this allows storage to be allocated dynamically across multiple sites.
As an organisation considering Private Cloud hosting, a SAN is a storage solution that can be used to host and protect your business’s critical information thoroughly. Drives hosted in Cloud SANs are protected using various technologies such as RAID to introduce redundancy and to provide performance that is far superior to virtual disk allocations.
Web hosting companies recognize the importance of electronic information to businesses and so one of the first steps that they take in the Private Cloud to protect your data is to mirror the hard drives that it is stored on; hard drive mirroring means that if the primary hard drive storing your information fails, there will be a second available to serve your data so that no data loss occurs.
Private Cloud security features
Multiple security features are involved in any Cloud environment so that the chances of any unauthorized individuals being able to gain access to your data are vastly reduced. Whilst there is a hardware firewall protecting your Cloud hardware from the outside, you will quickly notice that all communications in the Cloud take place on the internal vLAN, which is responsible for connecting the hardware together. As communications are kept internal, it would be very hard for any hackers to eavesdrop on these communications.
Isolating different services into separate VMs in the Cloud is another security measure that you can take yourself. Rather than having all of your business’s information hosted on two or three VMs, you should maximize the resources that you have available to you and develop different VMs for different purposes, as this will allow you to disperse data.
As all storage elements here will be protected with different passwords, in the unlikely event that a hacker does gain access to your Cloud then any damage will be severely limited.
At bodHOST, we believe in tailoring the product around the customer. If there are specific custom security needs that you would like to have in your Private Cloud solution then we will be more than willing to accommodate these.
This is based on the belief that businesses from different industries are going to require different security measures based on their business activities and the data that they are handling.
As a conclusion, Private Cloud storage is a very secure and reliable method of data storage for large organisations. A Private Cloud can be developed to meet your business’s custom security needs if necessary so that you can offer your customers the assurances that they need regarding their information.