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Glossary of Terms

What is a Private Cloud?

Private Cloud Offers the Benefits of Ownership—with Some Drawbacks

A private cloud is a cloud computing model that is very similar to a public cloud, but provisioned over private IT infrastructure for the exclusive use of a single organization.

Hosted either on corporate premises or within an isolated third-party environment, a private cloud combines the self-service, scalability, and elasticity of a public cloud with the security, control, and customization of an enterprise data center.

At the same time, the staffing, management, and maintenance of a private cloud remain the responsibility of the company’s IT department, along with the associated costs, rather than being shifted to a third-party public cloud provider. As a result, the financial benefits of cloud computing may be somewhat reduced with this approach.

Private cloud can also be referred to as enterprise cloud, corporate cloud, or internal cloud. The term virtual private cloud (VPC) is sometimes used interchangeably with private cloud, though in practice a VPC is delivered over a third-party cloud provider’s infrastructure, often co-located alongside other VPCs within a public cloud, rather than over internal infrastructure.


Learn more about secure application delivery in private cloud.

How A10 Networks Supports Private Cloud

Private cloud application delivery offers agility, control, and scale, but can pose challenges around complexity, visibility, and security. A10 Networks Thunder® Application Delivery Controller (ADC) helps organizations provide users with secure and reliable experiences when accessing applications hosted in private clouds through advanced load balancing, traffic management, security, and analytics capabilities

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