What should businesses do to make a private cloud succeed?

Like any shift in tech, adapting to a private cloud, especially from a mainframe, requires a plan and proper procedure. Some enterprises make mistakes in trying to achieve private cloud functionality, but Gartner analyst Tom Bittman recently highlighted some of the common problems that nearly 100 percent of 140 surveyed attendees at his company's Las Vegas Datacenter Conference have faced.

The most commonly cited problem, accounting for more than 30 percent of responses, was "failure to change the operational model." Of the remaining respondents, 19 percent said they were "doing too little" to promote cloud functioning, and 6 percent are using the wrong technologies. Only 5 percent said they were totally satisfied.

A key issue raised by these findings is that some businesses might not understand whether they are using a real cloud in the first place. Writing for SearchCloudComputing, editor Nicholas Rando outlines the strengths of the cloud, which he says sometimes get confused with virtualization.

"A private cloud is a cloud infrastructure protected by a firewall that limits usage to a single enterprise," he says. "In addition to their exclusivity, private clouds can be managed both on-premises and off. Private clouds often use virtualization for on-premises environments. Understanding private cloud allows enterprises to take full advantage of its benefits — automation, agility, control, cost-efficiency and more."

An easy mainframe modernization web-based access plan can be simple to implement with the right terminal emulation server, and transfer access for all of the crucial applications that you need to commonly-used internet browsers for the entire workforce to access.

This kind of solution will also leave businesses in less doubt over the strength of their systems and help them maximize the approach they are taking to deliver secure and dependable private cloud-quality performance on all participating computers.