A successful private cloud migration starts with data and apps

The use of private clouds is becoming old news, as many enterprises are much more comfortable with this approach to cloud computing than they are with moving their data to the public cloud. Indeed, the private cloud is a valuable resource if you pick the right applications and data sets for the move. Most enterprises do not. Private clouds, at least the IaaS flavors, are sold by a number of providers, including Microsoft, VMware, Rackspace, and dozens of OpenStack upstarts. There are even private PaaS clouds available from the likes of ActiveState and Apprenda. AWS supports a virtual private cloud (VPC), which means you get your own private space on Amazon's public cloud.