We rely on our intranet to house HR documents, and to share documents internally. Can we replace the intranet with a Private Cloud?

Anonymous;

No, yes and sort of. A private cloud (insourced or outsourced) is just a way of allocating assets, structuring interactions and the like. So, unless you are going to go outside, and shut down all of your internal systems (save for the line out), you still need the intranet to run your private cloud. Let's assume that you want a private cloud that is hosted....

...Kathi (above) indicates the first level of this: SaaS. Move your docs and throw away your file / DMS servers. That isn't cloud per se...but if all you are doing is doc sharing and management, that is completely adequate. There are a bunch of vendors in this space, and in my experience it is a great move from a cost and reliability standpoint. The areas to watch are (imho): how painful is it to administer, and how painful is it to navigate?

HR documents especially; you don't want Joan to see Jane's comp plan. Dropbox or it's ilk *can* provide some security around this, but it is not (in my experience) as robustly designed for that as other services. You don't want to have to replace a server and wires with a person spending full-time dealing with access issues.

Navigation is the second big leg for me. This includes a good UI, good metadata collection, and a robust access methodology.

But: do you need a private cloud? It doesn't sound like it, not unless you have a bunch of stuff that already works together that you want to migrate up. If it is just a DMS and you have a license, just host the thing.

If your heart is set on it, your DMS vendor can probably direct you to a SaaS, PaaS or IaaS vendor that they know is capable of hosting their product.

Yes, security certainly is important to HR documents. Most require security restrictions but must also need to be shared with individuals or departments to facilitate efficient work processes. Some other things you might look for in a system to manage and share HR docs are:retention management, as the life of HR documents are often long, balanced with the need for timely destruction, and packet completion, or the ability to ensure that certain types of documents are present in employee files (e.g. I-9s or annual reviews).

Yes, you can replace your intranet with a Private Cloud in order to house HR documents and to share documents internally. Private cloud (also called internal cloud or corporate cloud) is a marketing term for a proprietary cloud computing architecture that provides hosted services to a limited number of people behind a firewall. Advances in virtualization and distributed computing have allowed corporate network and datacenter administrators to effectively become service providers that meet the needs of their customers within the corporation. Private cloud is designed to appeal to an organization that needs or wants more control over their data than they can get by using a third-party hosted service.

There are also "Cloud" Lockboxes (used more for due diligence/audits) but totally secure for any use...