Private cloud is ill-advised and archaic says AWS boss
Private clouds are often sold as an inevitable stop over for companies on the way to adopting public cloud services.
But — perhaps unsuprisingly — the boss of the world's largest public cloud services provider Amazon Web Services disagrees.
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Private clouds offer "none of the benefits" of public cloud services and many of the costs of running an in-house infrastructure, according to AWS SVP Andy Jassy.
"To build a private cloud from scratch seems ill-advised, it's not cost effective and it's an archaic solution," he told the AWS Enterprise Summit in London today.
Unlike using a public cloud service, Jassy said building a private cloud infrastructure saddles companies with the capital expense of buying hardware and forces them to commit to running a base level of hardware, rather than spinning up servers on demand.
If internal IT staff are often still involved with running this private cloud infrastructure it means they have less time to work on tasks that will differentiate the business.
If a third party is running this private cloud then the infrastructure will likely cost more to operate than if a business ran it itself, he said.
The reason that large, incumbent technology companies are so keen to sell private clouds to enterprise is to "preserve the very large margins" they have historically enjoyed in the enterprise IT market, he said.
Hundreds of thousands of customers in 190 countries use AWS' suite of compute, storage and database cloud services, primarily its EC2 compute service and S3 storage service.