A private cloud is a cloud computing environment dedicated to a single customer or organization. It combines many of the benefits of cloud computing, such as elasticity, scalability, and ease of service delivery, with the access control, security, and resource customization of on-premises infrastructure. Private clouds are typically hosted on-premises in the customers data center, but they can also be hosted on an independent cloud providers infrastructure or built on rented infrastructure housed in an offsite data center. Private clouds are based on the same technologies as other clouds, such as virtualization of hardware components, which enables the customer to provision and configure virtual servers and computing resources on demand in order to quickly and easily scale in response to spikes in usage and traffic, to implement redundancy for high availability, and to optimize utilization of resources overall. Private clouds can be more secure than public clouds, with one important caveat: organizations must proactively manage and secure their private cloud resources. Private clouds can be deployed in a variety of ways, including on-premises, in a third-party data center, or within a public cloud infrastructure. Private clouds can also be combined with public clouds to create a hybrid cloud, allowing the business to take advantage of the benefits of both deployment models.