There’s nothing that says you can’t own your own cloud resources. You can set up your own private cloud, or internal cloud, using your own hardware by establishing a datacenter. To do this, you have to have the facilities, the hardware, and the human resources to manage it all. If you don’t have all of those resources, you can still have your own cloud. You’ll just have to rent or lease the resources from the manager.
Owning your own datacenter can be expensive. It can often be less expensive, and less of a headache, to using a cohosting service, go virtual with a virtual private network or use a virtual server, or just lease the monthly computing resources from a cloud hosting provider.
But which way is best? Is it all just a matter of budget?
No, it’s not all about monetary resources. You also have to weight security concerns, your own infrastructure resources, human resource concerns, and various other variables. If you do not have the facilities to store your hardware and don’t have it within your budget to do so, then you’d be better off renting or leasing the equipment from a cloud hosting provider.
Make a list of your resources and your needs. Perform a feasibility study that puts your own datacenter against the leasing option and see which one wins on paper.