Definition

dedicated cloud

What is a dedicated cloud?

A dedicated cloud is a single-tenant cloud infrastructure, which essentially acts as an isolated, single-tenant public cloud.

Dedicated clouds are a type of infrastructure as a service, help reduce an organization's downtime and cost, and promote flexibility and performance. Dedicated clouds work especially well for resource-intensive workloads.

Dedicated clouds may appeal to many regulated businesses because their servers can be isolated. With this isolation, users can have more control and customization options when it comes to features such as bandwidth and storage. Organizations can use a dedicated cloud for developing or extending on-premises applications in the cloud with included management tools, without needing to worry about the scalability of their infrastructure.

An example of a dedicated cloud is VMware's dedicated cloud option included in VMware vCloud Air (formerly known as vCHS). VMware's dedicated cloud is designed for large-scale cloud projects. IT organizations can migrate existing workloads, such as testing and development environments, to the service or develop new applications. Other dedicated cloud services include options from Avaya, Netsource and OVHcloud.

Dedicated cloud features

Features found in dedicated clouds might include the following:

  • Security provided by the service provider.
  • Existing development tools provided by the service provider.
  • Licensing cost, typically by month.
  • Ease of access to or customization of compute resources, storage, bandwidth, level of subscription by license, and support levels.

For example, customers of VMware's dedicated cloud can have complete control over CPU resources and memory and reserve storage for specific VMs. The dedicated cloud can also provide multiple gateways to the internet, which lets each virtual data center created have its own network and firewall configurations.

Dedicated cloud vs. private cloud, public cloud and hybrid cloud

Private cloud, public cloud and hybrid clouds are types of cloud architectures that can be easily confused with dedicated clouds.

In a public cloud, a service provider will make resources, such as VMs, applications or storage, available to the public over the internet. While a dedicated cloud is essentially a single-tenant isolated public cloud, a public cloud has a multi-tenant architecture, which lets users share computing resources.

In a private cloud, a service provider will deliver its services dedicated to the needs of a single organization. Private clouds have similar advantages to a public cloud but through a proprietary architecture.

A chart comparing public and private cloud features.

A hybrid cloud is the combination of private and public clouds, where a private cloud will connect to a public cloud infrastructure. In a hybrid cloud, data and applications are shared between public and private environments.

Dedicated cloud vs. dedicated server

A dedicated server is a type of remote server in a network that is dedicated to a single user, organization or application.

Unlike dedicated clouds, dedicated servers are entirely controlled by the service provider. Dedicated servers function as on-premises servers do, but the service provider owns and operates them.

This was last updated in December 2023

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