The primary benefit of public cloud model is its ability to share colossal amount of hardware and software among many end-users. Not to mention, these IT assets can be provisioned on-request, which further enables different business verticals to only pay for the services they use. Since the cloud computing systems are also configurable on-demand, enterprises can scale them up or down to substantial levels as and when required.

For many enterprises, however, this increasing interest in cloud technology has not transpired due to the usage of public cloud, but because of the adoption of private cloud. And, this comprises of the usage of private Platform as a Service (PaaS) mainly, something with which we would say most of us are still grappling with as a concept since it has hit the headlines a few years ago.

Before we dig deeper into the discussion and compare private versus public PaaS, it is of paramount significance to first understand what is Platform as a Service (PaaS) as a technology?

Well, PaaS no matter if it's private or public, offers elementary expansion, deployment and operation capabilities that provision the design, coding, analysis and management of cloud-based systems. The significance of this technology is that it facilitates the enterprises with an optimal alternative to provision whatever development tools are latest in technology at the time, including procuring the servers that are required to run them.

While using public PaaS, enterprise IT basically selects a public PaaS service provider, and after that they subscribe for the services and get to work. On the other hand, while using private PaaS, the end-users might have to do somewhat more than what they might be doing in the former case. Enterprise IT integrates private PaaS software on existing or new hardware, and in-house developers leverage private PaaS as they would do in case of public PaaS service.

But, the IT mavens look toward to the private PaaS with trepidation. Recently, it has been found that many of the IT mavens in various enterprises have taken a step back and started using public clouds, including public PaaS, quoting numerous and different reasons in regards to control, security, and compliance provisions, etc. and, in some cases, they do have a point. That is the reason why the private PaaS market has grown tremendously in the last few years.

Some of the evident benefits of private PaaS are as discussed below:

-Transferability to public clouds or possibly the capability to form hybrid clouds: This enables an enterprise to shift gear to public cloud based platforms when additional capacity is required, or possibly divide the processing between private and public clouds, to convert a hybrid cloud.

-The capability to facilitate a single enterprise cloud development environment: It clearly means that there will be principal control over development operations, including regulating the utilization of development and deployment gears.

-The capability to design cloud applications that normally could not prevail in public cloud: Even though, there are many who have unnecessarily spread around the alarm, insecurity and qualm around about the usage of public clouds. However, in many circumstances there are certainly legitimate and technical reasons that have been brought into light. As a result of which the placement of enterprise applications and other mission-critical data have been circumvented on to public clouds and adoption of private cloud platform raised to a great extent.

But, with every good part comes the bad part as well. And, comparable to all technologies, private PaaS do have some pitfalls.

One of the main hitches in the usage of private PaaS is that you may not be able to leverage the same cost benefits that you can with public PaaS, bearing this in mind you may have to procure, configure and operate the hardware and software needed to provision the platform. Thus, primarily we would say that nothing changes from traditional methodologies. And, in reality, private PaaS can make this more intricate and challenging to handle, considering that prevailing enlargement technologies normally don't go away that easily.

In a nutshell, we would say that despite of these few stumbling blocks, private PaaS is meant to stay in the niche market for long. And, in coming years we expect it to overcome all the above mentioned downsides and emerge as a game changer.