What Every Business Needs to Know about Dedicated Private Cloud

January 17, 2019

Dedicated Private Cloud gives customers the reliability, control and performance of a dedicated infrastructure with all of the benefits of the cloud.

Many businesses are looking to migrate to the cloud this year, but are having some reservations. First and foremost, is security. Becoming another headline in the string of cybersecurity breaches is not on the top of many organization’s to-do lists. The second concern for most IT professionals is losing control. They want to remain in full control of managing their personal cloud.

Thankfully, there is a cloud solution out there that delivers both security and control to customers while allowing them to experience all of the other benefits that the cloud has to offer. Dedicated Private Cloud offers the highest level of performance, control and security. It is cloud made easy.

What is Dedicated Private Cloud?

Dedicated Private Cloud offers a single-tenant environment with the highest level of performance, control, and security at a predictable monthly price. Dedicated Private Cloud provides physically discrete and highly available compute, storage, and network resources uniquely configured to a business’s unique requirements. Enterprises can retain full control of their compute environment while gaining the flexibility of virtualization, ideal for mission-critical applications and compliance standards.

Unlike other solutions, Dedicate Private Cloud is completely isolated from other cloud tenants in the data center. With its own security features, capacity and performance, Dedicate Private Cloud is truly a secure and controllable option.

The server isolation appeals to many organizations that are heavily regulated, such as healthcare, financial, manufacturing, and education industries, because it adds another layer of security. Customers of the Dedicate Private Cloud have complete control of central processing unit (CPU) resources and memory and can reserve storage for virtual machines.

Your Dedicated Private Cloud environment at LightEdge could not be easier to manage, automate and integrate. LightEdge’s Dedicated Private Cloud portal provides single-pane policy-based provisioning, process automation and infrastructure management. We help you deliver high-performance resources from LightEdge faster, more efficiently, and consistently.

Why Choose Dedicate Private Cloud?

If enterprises want to leverage the technology stack they know and trust with the benefits and scalability their business needs to remain competitive, then Dedicated Private Cloud is the right option for them. Here are some reasons why organizations are choosing Dedicated Private Cloud:

Powerful – Dedicated Private Cloud is built on VMware’s proven technology and is powerful enough for even the most mission-critical applications
Scalable – Deploying additional resources is fast and easy, so businesses can get on with more strategic endeavors
Compliant – Physically separate compute hardware for HIPAA and PCI-DSS compliance
Managed – LightEdge data centers are ISO 20000 & ISO 27001 validated with all operations following ITIL best practices
Monitored – Companies gain peace of mind with superior informatics, dashboards, and alerts to maintain and optimize your environment

Dedicated Private Cloud vs. Virtual Private Cloud

What is the difference between LightEdge’s Dedicated Private Cloud and our Virtual Private Cloud? Is one more ideal for your business than the other? There are definite use cases for each that rely heavily on your organization’s business goals around security, compliance, control, and flexibility.

If you prioritize a more cost-effective solution and need compute and storage resources quickly or in a short amount of time, then Virtual Private Cloud might be the best fit for you. If you want a controllable and isolated environment with high performance and robust workload objectives, then Dedicated Private Cloud might be your best fit to achieve those goals.

Traditionally, a Dedicated Private Cloud is used for larger cloud projects and includes more resource-intensive workloads. This solution, compared to many Virtual Private Clouds, provides additional protections and flexibility.

It is important to note that choosing between a Dedicated Private Cloud solution and a Virtual Private Cloud environment is not necessarily an either/or proposition. Customers may buy instances of both and connect their workloads in each over a virtual private network.

Here is a look at the ideal use cases of Dedicate Private Cloud vs. Virtual Private Cloud.

Dedicated Private Cloud

Dedicated Private Cloud environments are devoted to one organization and have strict security and compliance processes, similar to a Virtual Private Cloud solution. The true differentiator that a Dedicated Private Cloud offers is more IT control and flexibility. “With a Dedicated Private Cloud solution, customers have more flexibility with security designs,” said Mike McHenry, Vice President of Product Architecture at LightEdge. “More flexibility means a customer can more directly address their security concerns and requirements,” said McHenry.

Dedicated Private Cloud solutions use infrastructure that can be outsourced from a trusted provider that meets specific compliance and security criteria. The healthcare and financial industries typically look for a private cloud environment because they will be hosting highly confidential information. The federal and state guidelines also require a private cloud environment to meet their guidelines for data controls. Here are a couple of pros and cons for selecting a private cloud environment:

Pros: Offers high security and customization, reliable and efficient, lacks the concerns of a shared server, greater control, provider typically acts as trusted partner, greater provider support
Cons: Requires expert knowledge that the current IT team may not possess if the private cloud is kept on-premises, higher initial outlay but businesses find it balances out and becomes more cost-effective in the long-term compared to the public cloud

Virtual Private Cloud

The Virtual Private Cloud gives you maximum security and high performance you need at an affordable cost; all customized to your liking. Virtual Private Cloud would be ideal for you if:

You need compute and storage resources quickly or for a short amount of time
You don’t have staff to maintain your own Dedicated Private Cloud
You require resources close to traditional IT but don’t have enough need to justify a large investment
You need a cloud option that can be used for business continuity and disaster recovery

Since infrastructure resources are provisioned in advance, Virtual Private Clouds ensure demand spikes do not threaten your business’ network. However, since a Virtual Private Cloud is designed with tenant isolation in mind, initial configurations provide more security and separation. This ensures your environment remains safe even during your initial configuration and setup.

Features such as hardened operating system images, default “deny all” security settings, compliance certifications, and private networking options are features that can further differentiate a Virtual Private Cloud from a public cloud. Here are some pros and cons of a Virtual Private Cloud environment:

Pros: Virtual Private Cloud can be the sweet spot for those that need security in the cloud, but don’t want to invest in a Dedicated Private Cloud. It’s hybrid-ready and redundant.
Cons: Virtual Private Cloud might not be ideal for companies that do not have strict regulatory requirements to meet, robust workload objectives, and high-performance requirements, or those that prefer a CapEx spending cycle.

Benefits of Dedicated Private Cloud

Experts suggest that due in part to hidden charges, including network bandwidth, many companies are unaware of the total cost of ownership (TCO) in a public cloud solution. A study completed by 451 Research shows that a private cloud solution, like dedicated private cloud, is actually less expensive for many businesses.

The research completed by 451 shows that 41 percent of IT decision-makers find their private cloud to be less expensive than a comparable public cloud. Further, 24 percent said they pay a premium of 10 percent or less for their private cloud, which is well worth it for organizations benefiting from the other advantages of the private cloud.

Larger Enterprises that are migrating from a legacy on-premise system often find it easier to deploy their workloads to the Dedicated Private Cloud, as it can be customized to support any application and gives them control. A successful migration is critical to achieving the intended benefits of the new environment, which the higher success rate of migrations to private clouds is another potential cause of a lower TCO than public cloud.

Control Benefits of Dedicated Private Cloud

Research by Ixia reveals that 90 percent of IT professionals are concerned about data and application security in public clouds. Thankfully, Dedicated Private Clouds can offer world-class security.

A general private cloud sits behind a firewall and limits access to your internal departments, employees, and customers in your organization. Our Dedicated Private Cloud takes it a step further. At LightEdge, customers that use Dedicate Private Cloud are in a single-tenant environment that their organization can access. This access is shared with LightEdge administrative access.

Who Should Use Dedicated Private Cloud?

Once an organization has determined its cloud needs and priorities, it can decide if Dedicated Private Cloud is the right kind of IT environment for them. For some companies, Dedicated Private Cloud may be the only realistic option to ensure regulatory compliance. Get the control, performance and security of dedicated infrastructure with all of the advantages of the cloud using our Dedicated Private Cloud.

For example, HIPAA requires that electronic protected health information (e-PHI) is created, received, stored, and transmitted in a way that ensure its confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Because of these regulations, a Dedicated Private Cloud solution would be best suited for healthcare organizations.

In addition, PCI DSS is designed to ensure that all companies that accept, process, store or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment. Banks and retail organizations would also best align with a dedicated private cloud solution.

In addition to those who comply with PCI or HIPAA and HITECH, organizations with predictable and consistent resource demands should also consider a dedicated private cloud solution. These organizations are more likely to maximize their resources and as a result, are less likely to take full advantage of the elasticity of the public cloud.

To find out if Dedicated Private Cloud will benefit your organization, start by evaluating your flexibility, security, compliance and cost requirements. You should also consider the applications you use and what environment is suitable for them and their capacities. A quality cloud service provider, like LightEdge, can offer hosted private cloud solutions and give advice based on the specific information surrounding your organization.

Ready to Deploy Dedicated Private Cloud?

LightEdge’s Dedicated Private Cloud powered by VMware offers the highest level of performance and security. Our solution is compliant hosted computing designed to scale with your business needs.

Dedicated Private Cloud is ideal for you if:

You have high performance and/or robust workload objectives
You want to avoid CapEx spending for next equipment lifecycle
You need to move skilled IT staff away from worrying about hardware
You need to need meet strict compliance and security standards, such as HIPAA or PCI-DSS

LightEdge designed this Dedicated Private Cloud with features that combat common cloud challenges. Dedicated private cloud gains you access to LightEdge’s Hybrid Solution Center and access to our highly trained engineers with 24/7/365 live support.

In addition, from a dedicated physical infrastructure to a virtual delivery model, we have got the compliant cloud and hosting solution for your organization. Retain the level of control you want, and the amount of data isolation you require.

From simply ordering-up capacity in fully-managed environments to private clouds that are a customized configuration of infrastructure into any layer of the stack, LightEdge’s world-class facilities built to Tier III standards and talented engineers are ready to accommodate your business’ requirements.

LightEdge is committed to keeping our customers’ IT operations, critical applications and data protected. We provide the technology and resources our customers require to get to a production state that meets their RTO and RPO requirements.

LightEdge also offers a comprehensive set of disaster recovery solutions to ensure uninterrupted performance of IT operations and mission-critical systems in the event of a disaster.

Want to learn more about LightEdge’s Dedicated Private Cloud, Powered by VMware? Contact one of our cloud experts to get started or to schedule your private tour of any of our seven data centers. We have security, compliance and cloud experts standing by to answer any of your questions and to show you how our Dedicated Private Cloud works, so you can benefit from it yourself.

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