When you refer to cloud I assume you refer to the public cloud. What role do you see for Private clouds especially for Financials and HR data of an enterprise? (Webinar Attendee Question)

The public cloud refers to any service that can be accessed by any customer (the 'public'). For example, on-line accounting systems are generally public cloud offerings because anyone can subscribe to them.

A Private cloud is a service that you set up with a vendor where they manage your servers and software for you. Private clouds can be implemented in your data center (on-premise) or at your vendor's data center (RackSpace is an example of a company that implements private clouds).

There are little or no cost advantages to implementing a private cloud on-premise. You still need to incur all costs associated with your IT infrastructure - servers, networks, software, data centers, support and administration staff. You begin to realize cost advantages in a vendor hosted private cloud because they can allocate their infrastructure and personnel costs across multiple clients.

In general, private cloud solutions will be more expensive than public cloud solutions because you still need to purchase the hardware & software and the costs associated with housing the servers in a separate 'cage' at the hosting site.

One advantage of cloud solutions is that most cloud vendors provide some sort of system redundancy - if something happens to their primary data center, they can switch to a secondary site instantly. If you implement a private cloud on-premise, you would also need to implement a secondary site - which doubles your overall IT costs.