Also called an internal or corporate cloud, private cloud computing gives businesses many of the benefits of a public cloud - including self-service, scalability, and elasticity - with the additional control and customization available from dedicated resources over a computing infrastructure hosted on-premises.

A private cloud is a cloud computing environment dedicated to a single organization. Any cloud infrastructure has underlying compute resources like CPU and storage that you provision on demand through a self-service portal. In a private cloud, all resources are isolated and in the control of one organization.

The private cloud is defined as computing services offered either over the Internet or a private internal network and only to select users instead of the general public.

In a private cloud, a single organization controls and maintains the underlying infrastructure to deliver the IT resources. In a public cloud, external cloud providers deliver the resources as a fully managed service. For example, applications require computing resources like internal memory, data storage, and CPU.