What the private cloud really means [Video]

The definition of the private cloud may be fuzzy, but it’s all part of the age-old quest for greater efficiency in IT

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Cloud computing has two distinctly different meanings. The first is simple: The use of any commercial service delivered over the Internet in real time, from Amazon’s EC2 to software as a service offered by the likes of Salesforce or Google.

The second meaning of cloud computing describes the architecture and technologies necessary to provide cloud services. The hot trend of the moment — judging by last week’s VMworld conference, among other indicators — is the so-called private cloud, where companies in effect “try cloud computing at home” instead of turning to an Internet-based service. The idea is that you get all the scalability, metering, and time-to-market benefits of a public cloud service without ceding control, security, and recurring costs to a service provider.

I’ve ridiculed the private cloud in the past, for two reasons. First, because all kinds of …