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If you’re in charge of IT at your company, it’s pretty safe to assume you already have a reference hardware architecture and available infrastructure within your organization. So you want to set up a private cloud on premises for workloads across your company. What more do you need, and how do you set up and manage your private cloud app environment effectively and efficiently? Here’s how to get started.

On-premises private cloud: A balance between control and flexibility

According to a recent study by Forrester, 92 percent of businesses expect to increase the role of on-premises cloud as part of their IT strategy. Why should such a large percentage of organizations consider on-premises cloud? Because it provides a great balance between control, performance and flexibility.

An on-premises private cloud works very well for organizations that want to take advantage of cloud technology and the agility it offers. But many IT leads also want more control of application environments and better performance. Sound familiar? You also have to worry about security, regulatory compliance and data privacy. An on-premises private cloud can address these concerns efficiently while remaining cost-effective.

Setting up application environments: Use the right software

The development and deployment of applications on a private cloud involves setting up a complex and dynamic environment. As you get going, you might ask the following questions:

• Provisioning: How can I provision compute, storage, networking, database and middleware faster?
• Installation and configuration: How do I handle the complexity of installing, configuring, integrating and managing the different software and middleware components on our infrastructure?
• Deployment: How can I repeatedly deploy dozens or hundreds of application environments for development, testing, quality assurance (QA) and production—all without human errors?
• Maintenance: How do I reduce the time, effort and risk of applying patches and upgrades on all the various components in our application environments?
• Control: How can I set up policy based controls that help us scale automatically and meet our security and governance policies?

With existing infrastructure in place, choosing software to help answer the above questions doesn’t have to be challenging. There are options out there, but none better than IBM PureApplication software.

IBM PureApplication: Simplify and automate your private cloud

IBM PureApplication can help organizations create a private cloud within their data center on their own hardware infrastructure. PureApplication adds capabilities to simplify and automate the full software and middleware stack to ease managing the lifecycle of application environments.

PureApplication can divide and isolate physical resources through cloud groups so you can effectively divide and protect resources between development, testing, QA and production. It also provides monitoring at the middleware, OS and virtualization layers and uses integrated encryption support for patterns to improve application security.

At the top of the stack, pre-built and customizable patterns capture the topology and configuration of the application environment. This pattern can be used to repeatedly deploy the environment repeatedly with just a few clicks.

Patterns can save a significant amount of time, effort and risk, especially when deploying the same app environment across numerous development, test, QA and production scenarios. With push-button deployment, middleware, databases, connections and configurations can be managed consistently, in just minutes.

Patterns can also be used in a hybrid cloud environment. You can use the same pattern to deploy your app environment on PureApplication running in an IBM Cloud environment. Now you get the best of both worlds, whether you are building a private cloud, moving to a public cloud or both.

To learn more about IBM PureApplication and what it can do for your cloud, read this primer: How, where and why IBM Bluemix Local System and PureApplication fit in your cloud. Ready to explore more? Visit this web page.

The post How to set up a private cloud platform appeared first on IBM Systems Blog: In the Making.