Distinct Advantages of Virtual Private Clouds

Virtual Private Clouds or VPC are nothing but private cloud infrastructures offered within a public cloud. Although VPC shares multiple similarities with public cloud it is somewhat different.

VPCs can be accessed via intranet, in contrast to internet accessible public clouds. Data security within VPC can be implemented by ensuring number of elements such as private IP addressing, encryption, tunneling, and allocation of unique VLAN to every customer.

Virtual Private Clouds offer large number of benefits to businesses by supporting private cloud computing in a public cloud environment. You can securely transfer data between your organization and a public cloud provider by providing total isolation to data belonging to every customer whether it is within the network of cloud provider or in transit.

Optimum bandwidth efficiency

In a normal setup of a public cloud network infrastructure, cloud associated traffic is sent through the organization’s data center leading to bandwidth wastage as well as unnecessary use of firewall capacity, switch and router. The user is paying for two times the required bandwidth including the bandwidth for WAN connection as well as for the Internet.

It should be noted that the essential advantage of cloud is on demand resource availability. In this case, however the network needs to be constantly prepared for peak traffic causing compromised efficiency and excessive use of resources.

Whereas in Virtual Private Cloud network the bandwidth needed for accessing the cloud hosting provider will be subject to on demand billing. Additionally, the setup will facilitate users to access the application via the most cost effective and shortest route.

Enhanced application performance

Internet is perpetually vulnerable to congestion and it can even cause disruption or slow down of traffic to your application. In spite of seizing your network during peak times there is always the possibility of interrupted application performance due to inbound congestion causing applications to slow down. Virtual Private Clouds get routed through corporate MPLS based WAN. It will ensure that the traffic is accorded priority status for instant delivery.

Secured network

Traffic that is bound to and from Virtual Private Cloud does not cross internet and continues to remain within corporate firewall. Moreover, organizations can out in place routing policies to define user permissions to access cloud resources.

Provisioning and de-provisioning of users can be performed by simply executing directory change in a Virtual Private Cloud. This is because directory that is accessed for managing permissions and groups in the cloud is the same as the one used for managing cloud access.

There is an isolation of Virtual Private Cloud from other VPCs at the point of network layer thus eliminating the possibility of information or data from cloud infrastructure getting mixed with other infrastructures.

In case of pubic clouds however, transmissions can only be secured by way of encryption technology. It requires corporate IT to make sure that the encryption is properly configured. Users can not be prevented from accessing cloud resources in a public cloud environment.

Flexibility

An organization that is going to adopt Virtual Private Cloud has authority to clearly define the cloud architecture exactly in a manner that suits its requirements. VPC structure is designed to contain entire development assets and hence these can be easily restored, recovered, or cloned as a single unit without impacting other users of cloud.

Virtual Private Cloud infrastructure offers an ideal ground for development of applications and systems due to flexibility security and isolated environment. It provides a suitable platform for development of modern software applications that need to involve internal as well as external users in a collaborative and dynamic environment.

VPCs and service providers

The significant chunk of the growth of VPC market will be driven by enterprise VPS Hosting solutions. These services will essentially involve those features not covered as yet by public cloud solutions such as control, security, and privacy.

This is the right time for cloud service providers to expand service offerings by introducing Virtual Private Cloud solutions.

The solutions should be crafted by focusing on the following attributes:

• Highlighting enterprise strength while offering VPC services that are capable of handling comprehensive security
• Offering a clear cut differentiation by focusing on value added services and service levels that are capable of crossing basic computing capabilities
• Highlighting ability of VPC to facilitate genuine and end to end compute infrastructure as well as networking solutions backed by Service Level Agreements
• Targeting relevant workloads and customers
• Determining balanced pricing that has competitive advantage as well as ability of capturing premium markets

Cloud service market is poised for a sea change and according to Forrester the public cloud market is already going through peak phase and about to enter the uncomfortable period of margin pressures, commoditization, and price deterioration. Emergence of Virtual Private Cloud is bound to coincide with decline of public cloud. Virtual Private Clouds are ideal for handling significant workloads and deserve to be considered for business processes.