during the pandemic everyone rushed to the public cloud for the agility it provided and it looked like thats the future of it infrastructure but as employees return to offices as customers return to public spaces as the world becomes more normal many enterprises are realising that the public cloud cannot in every case address their compliance performance and cost considerationsthis is resulting in some brand new server offerings and one such is private cloud as a service thats coming from traditional hardware makers hpe has what it calls greenlake which already has some 65000 customers and powers more than two million connected devices dell has apex netapp has keystone pure storage has pure asaservice lenovo has truscale cisco has plus its kind of a private cloud for you what you experience is cloudish but the entire infrastructure is dedicated to you says ranganath sadasiva chief technology officer at hpe india in a private cloud as a service customers do not own the racks of servers they order for the vendors do the customers pay as per their usage but the servers may be physically present onpremise or at the nearest colocation centrethe servers are customised to the compute storage and networking configurations as requested by the customers who can in fact start on a basic requirement and then build more capacity on top of it the accompanying software stack makes the model a good fit for hybrid experience by ensuring interoperability with other cloud subscriptionscost is one of the main reasons behind companies scouting for a hybrid cloud model security too since you are no longer sharing server space with other customers other reasons include application efficiency operations efficiency and flexibility and agility in it infrastructure says manish gupta vp gm for the infrastructure solutions group at dell technologies indiaranganath says public cloud costs build up depending on how much data you are moving in and out of the cloud every customer query made to an application hosted in the public cloud that requires fetching inputs from a database for example is billed to the business which is hosting the application in the cloud this is not charged in the private cloud because you are operating within your domain so businesses need to look at the application behaviour and make a prudent choice he says adding that making the right decisions on workload placement will always ensure that you are right from a price perspectivethe fifth annual enterprise cloud index report by cloud software leader nutanix says that 57 of their survey respondents from india consider cloud cost as a challenging it management issue while 34 expressed a very concerned attitude about cloud costs in the context of their it budgets for the upcoming year application efficiency is another important consideration because thats what drives value for their consumers or for their employees and private cloud as a service gupta says may often ensure that efficiency more than the public clouda recent study by deloitte shows