Definition

private cloud (internal cloud or corporate cloud)

This definition is part of our Essential Guide: Private PaaS offerings: Benefits, challenges, best practices and more
WhatIs.com
Contributor(s): Stephen J. Bigelow

Private cloud is a type of cloud computing that delivers similar advantages to public cloud, including scalability and self-service, but through a proprietary architecture. Unlike public clouds, which deliver services to multiple organizations, a private cloud is dedicated to a single organization.

As a result, private cloud is best for businesses with dynamic or unpredictable computing needs that require direct control over their environments.

Public and private cloud deployment models differ. Public clouds, such as those from Amazon Web Services or Google Compute Engine, share a computing infrastructure across different users, business units or businesses. However, these shared computing environments aren't suitable for all businesses, such as those with mission-critical workloads, security concerns, uptime requirements or management demands. Instead, these businesses can provision a portion of their existing data center as an on-premises -- or private -- cloud.

A private cloud provides the same basic benefits of public cloud. These include self-service and scalability; multi-tenancy; the ability to provision machines; changing computing resources on-demand; and creating multiple machines for complex computing jobs, such as big data. Chargeback tools track computing usage, and business units pay only for the resources they use.

In addition, private cloud offers hosted services to a limited number of people behind a firewall, so it minimizes the security concerns some organizations have around cloud. Private cloud also gives companies direct control over their data.

But private clouds have some disadvantages. For example, on-premises IT -- rather than a third-party cloud provider -- is responsible for managing the private cloud. As a result, private cloud deployments carry the same staffing, management, maintenance and capital expenses as traditional data center ownership. Additional private cloud expenses include virtualization, cloud software and cloud management tools.

However, to reduce an organization's on-premises IT footprint, cloud providers, such as Rackspace and VMware, can deploy private cloud infrastructures.

A business can also use a mix of a private and public cloud services with hybrid cloud deployment. This allows users to scale computing requirements beyond the private cloud and into the public cloud -- a capability called cloud bursting.

This was last updated in March 2015

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great definition above, more detailed info can be found at http://quotecloudcomputing.com/privatecloud.html
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I think of a Private Cloud as a 'Fully-Meshed, Secure Network that results in Anytime, Anywhere Access with Built-in Redundancies to Provide Ultimate Availability'.

In 2012, the new technology landscape is agile and this mobility demands that one should be able to access the entire corporate network from anywhere (Internet Connection Required) even in the event of a power outage or other disaster at the main data center.

Public Clouds provide this access as well as the advantage of not maintainig or owning hardware, but let's face it, there is just some data that companies do not want in the Public Cloud.

Most companies fall into the 'Hybrid Cloud' category. A Hybrid Cloud is a complimentary relationship between Public Cloud assets and Private Cloud assets on a single, fully-meshed network.

By complimenting their Private Cloud a Public Cloud Computing strategy for non-sensitive data, companies can maintain some hardware in multiple locations for highly-sensitive data. These clusters can constantly replicate and provide a self-healing environment for the remote sites providing many of the same advantages of cloud computing, but without the risk of moving sensitive data into the hands of another company.

Just my $.02.
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Would you prefer a private cloud to public or hybrid clouds? Why or why not?
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I prefer a hybrid cloud because of its big data processing functionality. Using it is a valuable approach as we can move workloads. It acknowledges that not all IT resources should exist in public clouds. Agility with a hybrid system is more flexible. By using hybrid cloud fast deployments can be made. Perhaps the most important reason to use a hybrid cloud is to maintain security by keeping sensitive data in-house and rest on public cloud. 
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Personally, I prefer a hybrid cloud for many of the same reasons listed by shery089. But, as with most things, it depends. Each solution has it’s own benefits and challenges, and outshines the others for particular applications. Another factor that drives a lot of preferences is cost.We had Amazon come work with us to perform a TCO assessment for public, private and hybrid solutions. The analysis showed that, again, there were scenarios in which each implementation was more cost effective than the others.
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Most companies still haven't figured out private or public cloud, although public clouds are much better understood because businesses don't have to build one, they just consume it. Most companies need some mix of off-prem and on-prem resources, whether or not they are linking together applications in a "hybrid" model. 
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I am solution provider, and about to provide a solution to bid an enterprise project. Think of scalability and cost-effectiveness private cloud is not suitable to our client who want cloud service while worrying data secure and budget.
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I prefer public cloud as it is relatively cheap and also because my organisation size is not that large. In a public cloud you don't need to worry about server management and its security. 
My host does that for me. A firewall along with backup solution for my files. This is enough for our business.

Private cloud on the other hand is costlier and requires additional work power to handle it.
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Our product use public cloud for our individual client for its availability,  flexibility and maintainability.   Hybrid Cloud to conform some legal requirement in government segment and/or enterprise constraint not allow there data to be stored elsewhere except its own organization.
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Given the pace of innovation in the public cloud, as well as the move to digitize business (which is data-centric and will want to leverage those data-services in the public cloud), it's hard to imagine a successful business being only private cloud in the next 5-10 years. 

We talked with Microsoft a couple weeks ago about their upcoming Azure Stack (cloud on-premises), http://www.thecloudcast.net/2016/03/the-cloudcast-243-understanding-azure.html , and even they said that some public cloud services just don't make sense on-premises. 
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A private cloud is a scalable hosting solution that provides agility and redundancy of IT infrastructure for your enterprise. Private cloud hosting solutions are suitable for large enterprises and SMBswho have large compute and storage requirements, need to promptly respond to innovation, or have requirements related to control, security and compliance.
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This is s a pretty limited definition. Too many people want to call their virtualized servers "private cloud", but there should be a focus on:

- highly automated
- self-service access to resources
- on-demand services (IaaS, DBaaS, etc.)
- programmatic access to resources (via APIs) 
- focused on enabling developers to build new or modified applications

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Our Wikibon research is only seeing about 5-10% of what people call "Private Cloud" are actually functioning like a Public Cloud. We plan to release more research on it this month - http://wikibon.com/true-private-cloud-will-begin-shipping-to-the-market-in-2016/
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