One of the things we’ll be reading about throughout the coming year is the migration to private cloud. Focused in the mind of corporate America on Sept. 4 when Microsoft first released Windows Server 2012, private cloud migration will be a key topic for discussion, decision and deployment.

With a tremendous volume of noise being generated around the concept of “cloud computing” you may not be certain exactly what a private cloud is. You’re not alone. 

The most important concept to embrace in this discussion is that a private cloud is not necessarily located somewhere other than your own premises. You can, and will, deploy Windows Server 2012 in servers located on your own premises, and Microsoft calls it the Cloud OS because you can make your server a “private cloud” server right there in your own data center.

In fact, a private cloud server may be located on your own premises, in a co-location facility or at a “cloud provider.”  o distinguish a private cloud server from what is traditionally thought of as a server. Microsoft has turned to the most well-established standard, the definition of cloud computing as published by NIST, the National Institute for Standards & Technology. The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing document is very brief and something everyone in the IT industry should read through carefully.

According to Symon Perriman, Technical Evangelist for Private Cloud Technologies at Microsoft, the Microsoft definition of a private cloud is:

“Private cloud is the implementation of cloud services on resources that are dedicated to your organization, whether they exist on-premises or off-premises. With a private cloud, you get many of the benefits of public cloud computing  — including self-service, scalability and elasticity — with the additional control and customization available from dedicated resources.”

Source: http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization/en/us/private-cloud.aspx

In a TechNet Magazine article from May 2011, Microsoft Solution Architects David Ziembicki and Adam Fazio begin by saying:

“There are many definitions for cloud computing, but one of the more concise and widely recognized definitions comes from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). NIST defines five essential characteristics, three service models and four deployment models. The essential characteristics form the core of the definition. The required characteristics for any solution to be called a true “cloud” solution include:

• On-demand self-service
• Broad network access
• Resource pooling
• Rapid elasticity
• Measured service"

The underlying objective of a private cloud implementation is to create a “layer of abstraction” between the user and the actual technology. Properly deployed, a private cloud should allow users to focus on the work they need to get done without having to think about where things are stored, or what “drive letters” they have to “attach” to. They simply use clearly designed menus to request whatever they need to get their job cone.

Over the course of the next five Migration Expert Zone posts we’ll explore each of these essential characteristics to come to understand how they impact our network and our users.