Managed private cloud is dedicated cloud infrastructure operated on your behalf by a third-party provider. Your workloads run in an environment built exclusively for your organization, not shared with other tenants, and a team of specialists handles the day-to-day management so yours doesn't have to. According to IDC's 2024 Server and Storage Workloads Survey, approximately 80% of organizations plan to repatriate some computing and storage resources from public cloud within the next 12 months. For many, managed private cloud is where those workloads are landing.
At Concourse, we work with organizations in healthcare, financial services, higher education, manufacturing, and nonprofits who manage mission-critical SQL Server and Windows environments. This guide explains what managed private cloud actually is, how it compares to your other infrastructure options, and what to look for when evaluating a provider.
Before getting into what "managed" means, it helps to understand the model itself. Private cloud means the underlying infrastructure is provisioned for a single organization's exclusive use. NIST's official definition describes it as infrastructure that "may be owned, managed, and operated by the organization, a third party, or some combination of them, and it may exist on or off premises."
That's a deliberate contrast to public cloud (platforms like Azure, AWS, and GCP), where you're running workloads on shared, multi-tenant infrastructure managed entirely by the provider.
Both models have a place. Public cloud is well-suited for variable workloads, cloud-native development, and situations where elastic scalability matters more than performance consistency. Managed private cloud is better suited for workloads that require predictable performance, strict compliance controls, and clear infrastructure ownership.
|
Factor |
Public Cloud |
Managed Private Cloud |
|
Pricing and cost |
Complex, unpredictable pricing with hidden fees (bill shock) |
Transparent, predictable pricing with no surprise charges |
|
Solutions |
Generic solutions regardless of specific needs |
Custom solutions tailored to unique business requirements |
|
Visibility |
Limited visibility into systems and performance |
Client portal allows for stress-free system and performance monitoring |
|
Integration |
Limited ability to integrate with legacy or specialized systems |
Seamless integration with existing infrastructure and applications |
|
Support |
Impersonal ticketing systems with slow response times; outsourced teams |
Direct access to US-based engineers via video support and real-time response |
|
Performance |
Resource contention causes unpredictability |
Dedicated resources ensure consistent, reliable performance |
|
Security and recovery |
Shared infrastructure with potential security risks; longer disaster recovery times |
Dedicated, isolated infrastructure with segmented environments; 4-hour RPO/RTO |
The right call depends on the workload. For generalized, elastic applications, public cloud often makes sense. For mission-critical databases, compliance-sensitive data, and performance-dependent systems, managed private cloud typically offers material advantages.
This is where most articles on private cloud fall short. They explain what private cloud is but skip the part that matters most to IT leaders: who does what.
"Managed" means the provider takes operational responsibility for your infrastructure. Not just the hardware. Not just uptime. The full stack of specialized roles and ongoing duties that would otherwise sit on your team.
At a well-run managed private cloud provider, that includes dedicated roles covering:
The specific duties covered under those roles include network architecture and compute/storage design, systems integration (including cloud integration for hybrid environments), identity and access management, network security, logging and monitoring, vulnerability and patch management, incident management, problem management, and capacity planning.
That's not a helpdesk. That's an operational team embedded in your environment.
The staffing reality makes this worth examining closely. A minimum viable in-house cloud infrastructure team (one Cloud Architect, two Cloud Engineers, one Security Engineer, one DBA, and a DevOps engineer) carries a combined base salary of roughly $830,000 per year. Fully loaded with benefits and accounting for the 13-21% annual turnover rate common in IT, you're looking at $1.2 million or more annually. And 76% of IT employers globally report talent shortages, making those roles harder to fill than ever.
A managed provider amortizes that cost across many clients and maintains continuous coverage, ongoing training, and 24x7x365 emergency response, all included in a predictable monthly fee.
Organizations running aging on-premises infrastructure often face a familiar set of problems: hardware refresh cycles that require large capital outlays, expiring support contracts, performance degradation from accumulated technical debt, and disaster recovery systems that haven't kept pace with modern recovery requirements. Retaining the specialized talent to manage that infrastructure keeps getting harder and more expensive. Software licensing costs have also risen sharply, particularly after Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, which has driven reported price increases ranging from 2x to 12x for many customers.
Managed private cloud addresses these pain points in specific ways:
The VMware/Broadcom situation has made this comparison especially relevant right now. With 86% of customers actively reducing their VMware footprints according to a 2026 CloudBolt survey, many organizations are using the forced re-evaluation as an opportunity to rethink their infrastructure model entirely.
Security is where managed private cloud creates the clearest separation from shared infrastructure.
In a public cloud environment, you operate under a shared responsibility model. The provider secures the infrastructure layer; you're responsible for everything above it: configurations, access controls, data, and applications. The boundary isn't always clear, and it's frequently misunderstood.
Two incidents illustrate different sides of this risk. In the Azure breach disclosed in January 2024 (and escalating through February), the Midnight Blizzard nation-state group compromised Microsoft's own corporate email environment after accessing a legacy test account with no MFA enabled. CISA issued Emergency Directive ED 24-02 describing the risk as "grave and unacceptable." The AWS breach campaign disclosed in August 2024 by Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 showed a different failure mode: attackers scanned 230 million targets, recovered over 7,000 cloud service credentials from misconfigured web applications, and used compromised AWS IAM credentials to exfiltrate and delete S3 data at scale. One attack exploited provider-level security failures; the other exploited the complexity of the shared responsibility model itself. Both resulted in real data loss.
In managed private cloud, accountability is unified. There's no handoff point, no ambiguity about who owns what, and no shared tenant risk.
At Concourse, our PRISM™ Security Framework is built on PCI DSS 4.0 security principles applied across all environments, not just for clients who require payment compliance. The infrastructure is triple-certified: PCI DSS 4.0, HIPAA/HITECH, and SOC 2 Type II. That last certification matters increasingly to enterprise buyers: 78% of enterprise clients now require SOC 2 Type II from service providers, according to Gartner.
Security tooling includes Rubrik for backup and recovery, Palo Alto Networks for network security, CrowdStrike for endpoint protection, and Cloudflare for edge security. These tools share threat intelligence for proactive, coordinated defense rather than functioning as isolated point solutions.
A few specifics worth knowing:
Tenant isolation. Every environment gets private VLANs, dedicated subnets, and firewalls by default. Data is physically and logically separated and never co-mingled.
Ransomware-proof backups. Rubrik's backup system protects both VMs and databases. Backups are locked against alteration or deletion from the moment they're created, with zero production impact during backup operations. Recovery is fast, auditable, and designed to perform in worst-case scenarios.
Disaster recovery. Concourse delivers a 4-hour RPO/RTO with rapid recovery capabilities, a meaningful contrast to the longer recovery times associated with standard public cloud SLAs.
Compliance readiness. PCI DSS 4.0 introduced 64 new requirements, with 51 becoming mandatory as of March 31, 2025. HIPAA's proposed Security Rule update (NPRM published December 2024) would make all implementation specifications mandatory and add a 72-hour restoration requirement for critical systems. SOC 2 Type II's operating effectiveness requirement means auditors examine actual performance over 3-12 months, not a point-in-time snapshot. These frameworks increasingly favor environments where organizations have clear infrastructure control, clean audit boundaries, and unified accountability.
For healthcare organizations specifically, breaches don't just carry financial risk; they affect patient safety. Single-tenant isolation, AES-256 encryption, and immutable backups are table stakes for clinical systems. Our HIPAA-compliant cloud hosting environments are built around these requirements from the ground up.
Most "what is private cloud" articles don't mention SQL Server. That's a significant omission for any organization running Microsoft-centric infrastructure.
SQL Server performance in public cloud is constrained by two factors: the shared compute model and how Microsoft licensing works in multi-tenant environments.
On the performance side, public cloud uses shared physical hosts with multiple tenants competing for the same resources. The "noisy neighbor" problem is real and persistent for transaction-heavy database workloads. Private cloud dedicates compute to your environment, eliminating that variability.
On the licensing side, the math changes substantially. In public cloud shared tenancy, SQL Server is licensed per vCPU. With hyper-threading enabled (standard on all modern servers), each physical core yields two vCPUs, meaning you're effectively paying for twice the licenses you'd need on physical hardware. AWS's own documentation notes that Dedicated Hosts can save up to 50% on SQL Server licensing costs compared to shared tenancy. In private cloud, you license per physical core and can run unlimited SQL Server VMs on that host under Software Assurance.
Our SQL Server hosting environments are purpose-built for this. They include a dedicated fast compute tier with fewer, faster cores and double the RAM optimized for SQL workloads, plus Pure Storage FlashArray//X with DirectFlash Modules (NVMe) delivering sub-millisecond latency. High availability runs on Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition with Always On Availability Groups in a 2-node active/passive configuration, with no performance impact on production during backups or DBCC operations.
SQL Sentry provides deep monitoring and diagnostics. Dedicated DBA support handles ongoing performance assessment and environment-specific optimization by certified SQL professionals, not a generalist support queue.
One underappreciated aspect of managed private cloud is what it does for identity management across the organization.
Concourse's Private and Secure IdP Portal provides unified access to users, applications, and infrastructure in a single portal. The identity-first design simplifies integration and management, with Single Sign-On (SSO) and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) built in. Centralized auditing and policy enforcement applies across systems, giving IT full visibility and control without creating friction for end users.
This matters for compliance as well as operations. The proposed HIPAA Security Rule update specifically calls out mandatory MFA and technology asset inventories. PCI DSS 4.0 expanded MFA requirements to all access to the Cardholder Data Environment. Having identity management centralized and managed rather than bolted on makes audit evidence substantially cleaner.
The cloud repatriation trend is real, though the data deserves some nuance. IDC's 2024 Server and Storage Workloads Survey found approximately 80% of organizations plan to repatriate some computing and storage resources from public cloud within the next 12 months, though only about 8-9% plan full repatriation. Barclays' 2H24 CIO Survey found that 86% of CIOs planned to repatriate at least some workloads from public cloud, the highest percentage on record, up from 43% in late 2020.
The takeaway here isn't that public cloud failed. It's that certain workloads never fit the model particularly well. Cost unpredictability is a consistent driver: 83% of CIOs report spending more on cloud than anticipated, with an average overspend of 30%, according to Azul's 2025 CIO Cloud Trends survey. The Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report found that 27% of cloud spend is wasted on average, and 84% of organizations cite managing cloud spend as their top challenge.
For Microsoft-centric workloads, the combination of SQL Server licensing multipliers, egress fees, and the cost of building adequate compliance controls in shared infrastructure makes the economics particularly challenging.
Outage risk is also part of the calculation. The Azure outage in July 2024, combined with the concurrent CrowdStrike Falcon sensor failure, affected approximately 8.5 million Windows devices globally and resulted in an estimated $5.4 billion in direct losses to Fortune 500 companies alone, per Parametrix. Critical cloud service interruptions among major providers increased 18% in 2024 compared to 2023 and lasted 18.7% longer overall, according to Parametrix's 2024 Cloud Outage Risk Report.
None of this means public cloud is wrong for your environment. It means workload fit matters.
Moving to managed private cloud doesn't mean locking into a static infrastructure model. Purpose-built environments should adapt as automation and AI capabilities mature.
Concourse's infrastructure includes Windmill for scalable workflows and orchestration, and is built for AI-driven infrastructure with Agentic AI using MCP (Model Context Protocol) for flexible integration. The architecture is designed to adapt and scale with evolving technology demands, so organizations aren't trading current constraints for future ones.
If you're evaluating providers, these questions separate serious managed providers from hosting companies that use "managed" loosely.
On SLAs and uptime
On backups and disaster recovery
On incident response
On support
On billing and pricing
On security
On performance
A managed provider confident in their service model should have straightforward answers to all of these. Vague answers on any of them are worth taking seriously.
Managed private cloud is a strong fit when one or more of the following apply:
Public cloud remains the right choice for variable, elastic workloads and cloud-native applications where hyperscaler tooling adds genuine value. The strongest infrastructure strategies often combine both: public cloud for what it does well, and managed private cloud for the workloads where dedicated resources, compliance certainty, and unified accountability matter.
*This post was researched and drafted with the assistance of AI. All posts undergo Concourse team input and full human review, including link and fact-checking, to ensure content is accurate and meets Concourse's editorial standards.
If you're evaluating your infrastructure options or running Microsoft-centric workloads that aren't performing the way they should, we'd be glad to have a conversation. At Concourse, we work with organizations in healthcare, financial services, higher education, manufacturing, and nonprofits to build purpose-built managed private cloud environments with security-first architecture and dedicated support from engineers who know your environment.
Schedule a consultation to get your questions answered and explore what managed private cloud could look like for your organization.
